The president of the troubled White House Correspondents’ Association, Eugene Daniels, insists he will not be stepping down from the position even as he leaves Politico to become a co-host and correspondent for liberal  MSNBC. 

His defiance comes at a time of existential crisis for the WHCA, which the Trump Administration has removed from its traditional role of choosing which press outlets serve as “pool” for coverage of the president. The organization is facing a “leadership crisis,” according to a former Trump White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer.

Mr. Spicer recently said on one of his podcasts that, “The White House is not going to negotiate with [Daniels]. He is an outspoken fanboy of Kamala, so they have a leadership problem right now…this is where ego gets in the way; he wants to chair the [White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner] and hang out with the Hollywood folks.”

“This is a situation where leadership matters, and the correspondents’ association… it a game of boxing, and they have a feckless leader who no one respects at the White House,” he said

Mr. Daniels has long faced allegations of liberal bias during his years as Politico’s White House correspondent and co-author of its influential Playbook newsletter. Now that he is joining MSNBC, some of his White House colleagues are questioning if he should remain at the helm of the WHCA at this time of crisis. Mr. Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has accused the association of liberal bias and excluding conservative news organizations. The new pool rotation, overseen by the White House, now includes conservative publications and broadcasters who’d previously been excluded by Mr. Daniels’ regime.  

Mr. Daniels rejects accusations of bias, telling the New York Times, in a recent, fawning profile, that it “doesn’t really matter who is in the Oval Office for me. My job is to find out information.”

The liberal media reporter Oliver Darcy reported in his closely-read “Status” newsletter that Mr. Daniels is generally “well-liked” in the White House press room. However, says Mr. Darcy, with the WHCA fighting for relevance after the White House stripped it of its main responsibility, Mr. Daniels is facing harsh scrutiny from his colleagues.

Those frustrations reportedly exploded during a contentious meeting of the association on Monday. Mr. Daniels acknowledged that the organization had been sidelined and left in a “precarious position.”  The White House also recently barred the Associated Press from pool duty after it refused to change its influential style book to use the name Gulf of America. 

According to Mr. Darcy, a reporter for the Washington Examiner, Christian Datoc, set the tone for the meeting of the White House correspondents’ meeting with the first question by asking if Mr. Daniels planned to serve out his full term as the head of the WHCA even as he takes his new hosting gig at MSNBC.

Mr. Daniels responded by saying that he planned to stay on as the head of the WHCA as he will still be covering the White House at MSNBC, Mr. Darcy reports. MSNBC has traditionally used NBC News White House correspondents for White House coverage, but is creating its own correspondent team now that it’s being spun off from NBCUniversal. 

After Mr. Datoc’s question, the meeting only “grew more combative” as journalists “pressed the board on its handling of the crisis and demanded to know what concrete steps it planned to take in response to Trump’s power play. Some argued that the WHCA had all but surrendered, failing to mount a meaningful response to an unprecedented assault on the press.”

Journalists in the meeting criticized the organization for, in their view, failing to get its members on board with a unified response to the Trump White House’s moves to take control of the press pool. At one point, a correspondent for Black Press USA, April Ryan, known for clashing with Mr. Trump during his first term, accused Mr. Daniels of providing her a “blow off” response instead of an answer to her question about the WHCA’s response to Mr. Trump. 

Mr. Daniels did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment by the time of publication. 

The soon-to-be MSNBC co-host has been known for his flamboyant fashion statements at social events such as the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where he’s worn a fuschia tuxedo and a blue garment with a cape that looked like a Star Trek uniform. He’s posed for pictures wearing women’s clothing and women’s footwear and holding a fan. 

 A vocal Kamala Harris supporter, he declared in one clip that has gone viral,   on a 2024 MSNBC,  that Mr. Trump was having a “hard time” running against Vice President Harris “because she’s a Black woman.”

“You remember he would tussle with the woman… our colleagues on the White House beat, he held his kind of most angry self for Black women, right? If they asked him a question, he would have the worst things to say about them,” he said. 

He also said Mr. Trump’s attacks on Ms. Harris were because of her race.

During an interview with Ms. Harris in September, he asked if Mr. Trump and Vice President Vance’s comments about Haitian migrants at Springfield, Ohio, was “a case of irredeemable racism that can’t be mitigated by any rational action.”

Mr. Spicer said recently that the vice president would have made him her White House press secretary if she had won the election.