President Donald Trump made yet another jab at CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The president’s remarks, made live on Friday, included a comparison of Collins to trans actor Dylan Mulvaney.
Donald Trump targets Kaitlan Collins at WHCD
Minutes after CNN’s Kaitlan Collins accepted an award for her coverage of Donald Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president used his own time at the podium to dismiss her win entirely.
“I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” Trump told the crowd. “It was all about me. It’s a fake– she shouldn’t get the award, it was a fake. But I didn’t mind, I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake, there’s no question about it.”
Collins sat with her CNN colleagues near the stage as Trump spoke, as he moved from mocking her award to a comment he has made about her before. “She’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles,” he said. “I said, ‘Kaitlan, do you ever smile? Smile. You have a nice position, you’re at CNN fake news, you should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.'”
Trump followed this with an attempted joke tying Collins to Dylan Mulvaney, the trans actor whose 2023 partnership with Bud Light triggered a conservative boycott. “I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship,” he said, “but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.”
Kid Rock, a Trump ally, had helped drive the backlash against Bud Light and its parent company Anheuser-Busch after Mulvaney posted a video featuring the brand’s cans during March Madness. Anheuser-Busch lost $27 billion in market value by early 2024 as a result (via PEOPLE).
Trump cited a higher number at the WHCD. “Dylan Mulvaney cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap,” he said. “That was the worst commercial ever made by the way, for those few people who want to hear that. Most people don’t care, but I would. I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan any time soon.”
Originally reported by Devanshi Basu on Mandatory.
