The nation’s only sitting Black governor was excluded from an upcoming bipartisan dinner for governors at the White House, a decision he said could be rooted in racism.
“This week I learned that I had not been invited to this year’s National Governors Association dinner – a decades-long annual tradition designed to bring governors from both parties together to build bonds and celebrate a shared service to our citizens with the President of the United States,” Governor Wes Moore, Democrat of Maryland, wrote in a statement.
“As the nation’s only Black governor, I cannot ignore the fact that excluding ourselves from this bipartisan tradition carries an added weight — whether that was the intention or not,” he added, calling the choice a sign of “blatant disregard and an aversion to the spirit of a bipartisan partnership between the federal states.”
The White House has rejected this reading of the decision.
“Many Democrats were invited to dinner at the White House, and some were not,” a White House official said told Politics. “These are White House events and the president reserves the right to invite whomever he wishes.”
Jared Polis, the Democratic governor of Colorado, was also singled out for not being invited to the black-tie event.
President Trump previously announced that the annual meeting of governors at the White House this month will include only Republicans.
The administration still plans to host a bipartisan dinner with governors and their spouses while they are in Washington for the National Governors Association meeting, which begins Feb. 19.
The NGA has said it will not consider the meeting or dinner as officially sanctioned NGA events.
“The president has decided to invite only Republican governors,” the NGA told members, according to an email obtained by The New York Times. “The NGA leadership has determined that this will not be an NGA event and that no NGA resources will be used to support transportation for this activity.”
“The NGA will not support this dinner,” Moore told CNN State of the Union on Sunday. “If the president wants to have a dinner with his friends and have a black tie dinner with his friends that night, that’s fine. It won’t be an NGA event.”
The back-and-forth over the invitation comes amid controversy over Trump’s social media account, which shared a video Friday depicting former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle as monkeys, evoking age-old racist tropes used to dehumanize Black people.
Trump launched his political career in part by spreading the birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
President Trump has refused to apologize, claiming he did not watch the full clip before it was posted. A White House official told The hill an employee “wrongly” shared the video on his behalf. It has since been removed.
The video drew rare, bipartisan criticism of the president, including from Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only black Republican in the Senate.
“It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen in this White House. The president should take it down,” Scott, who is black, said in a speech. message on X.
Moore and Trump have fought each other in the past.
Maryland’s governor pushed back on Donald Trump’s threat to send the National Guard to Baltimore to fight crime, prompting Trump to threaten to withhold funding to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which was destroyed in 2024 when a ship collided with it.
At last year’s governor’s meeting at the White House, President Trump had a memorable exchange with Maine Governor Janet Mills as the two clashed over the president’s executive order pushing governments to ban transgender women and girls from women’s sports or risk losing federal funding.
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