WATCH: Comedian Amber Ruffin Joins The Daily Beast Podcast

When the political news cycle—corporate-sponsored egg rolls, Greenland tours, ugly portraits and El Salvadoran prisons—is proving more outlandish than the most left-field punchlines, how do you craft a sharp set of jokes for a crowd not likely to find much humor in, well, all of the funny business?

With a lot of alcohol, that’s for sure.

At least, that’s according to the host of the 2025 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, comedian Amber Ruffin, who joined co-hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee on this week’s episode of The Daily Beast Podcast to explain her preparations for the big event.

“I do think there will be a sense of... what the hell are we doing? It’s bonkers that we’re still acting like things are normal,” said Ruffin, who also serves as a team captain on CNN’s Have I Got News for You? “We’re all going on this roller coaster, right? You spend five minutes (thinking) hey, we’ve had worse. Then you turn a corner and you’re like, ‘no, this is bad as it will ever be.‘”

It’s certainly been a rollercoaster week for many key members of Trump’s administration, thanks to “Signalgate,” which made headlines this week after Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he was accidentally added to an unsecured group chat containing a number of high-profile national security figures—including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Vice President J.D. Vance—and their “highly classified” discussion of attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen.

The Daily Beast’s executive editor Hugh Dougherty told Coles and Bee that the revelations—and mixed messaging from the Trump administration amid attempts to clean-up the articles’ fallout—were a “bizarre spectacle.”

“It’s kind of like Schrodinger’s chat,” Dougherty said. “It’s both non-existent and secret and true and classified and not classified all at once. It’s basically a bit of everything.”

Coles questioned how it could impact President Donald Trump and his agenda. “This exposes what buffoonery is happening at such high levels that it is surely the moment people will look behind the curtain and see a little old man instead of the great Wizard of Oz,” she said. “I wonder if this will be a turning point.”

Coles and Bee also chatted with former Fox News host and political adviser Steve Hilton ahead of the release of his new book, Califailure, which offers his insight on “reversing the ruin of America’s worst-run state.” As Hilton explained, he’s “California Dreamin’” of some big changes for the state, and its leadership—both in his book’s pages and on the broader political scene. Listen along for to this week’s podcast for more details.

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