For an hour and four minutes on Friday night, the president stood at a podium in a hotel he used to own and used the White House press corps as a prop. The irony of staging a White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the presence of a man actively working to dismantle the First Amendment protections of the very press he was ostensibly there to honor is almost too thick. To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump used the event as a campaign rally and personal vendetta, targeting CNN’s chief White House correspondent and anchor Kaitlan Collins with misogynistic, transphobic “jokes,” and capping the night with a “Trump 2028” hat — an authoritarian flourish masquerading as humor.
The press stayed seated and silent.
A press corps with any genuine values would have walked out. They would have recognized that attention is what fuels Trump’s authoritarian political strategy. Instead, reporters sat in their black-tie attire and behaved like sycophants. For an institution that loves to preen about its courage, the WHCD was a profile in cowardice. The people in that ballroom knew that Trump and administration officials have barred reporters from briefings, pursued subpoenas against journalists and threatened outlets with legal action, and that he routinely labels unfavorable coverage “fake news” to discredit any check on his power. It would have been absurdly simple for the White House Correspondents’ Association to issue a straightforward, principled declaration: “We cannot in good conscience allow a president who does not believe in the First Amendment protections this night celebrates to attend this event. Accordingly, we have rescinded our invitation.” But they refused to make a stand, apparently terrified of losing their access.
Even some of the president’s usual sympathizers on television couldn’t pretend the choice made sense. The hosts of MS NOW’s “Morning Joe,” who once sprinted to Mar‑a‑Lago in the early days of Trump’s presidency, called the decision to host him “tone‑deaf,” saying the event should never have been held in its current form and highlighting the absurdity of platforming him while his Justice Department subpoenas New York Times journalists for doing their jobs. (On July 23, the department rescinded the subpoenas after a federal judge said it hadn’t followed appropriate procedures in its investigation of how reporters obtained information on the new Air Force One’s security capabilities.) The television hosts were right about the tone‑deafness, but wrong about the scale. This wasn’t merely tone‑deaf; it was a dereliction of duty.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had won the WHCA’s Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for her reporting on the tense February 2025 Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In his address, Trump could not let the opportunity pass. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” he told the room, then spent the next several minutes insisting the award was “fake,” that she “shouldn’t get” it, and that she “never smiles.” Trump told her to smile. Then he built to the joke he’d clearly been saving: that he thought Collins had landed a lucrative new endorsement deal with Bud Light, only to learn the face on the beer can actually belonged to Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender actress whose 2023 partnership with the brand triggered a right-wing boycott.
But factual accuracy was never really the point. The point was to shame a reporter by misidentifying and weaponizing a person’s identity, using two women’s faces to deliver one insult.
It’s an old joke often shared by conservatives on X. The only problem is that there was no Bud Light commercial starring Mulvaney. But factual accuracy was never really the point. The point was to shame a reporter by misidentifying and weaponizing a person’s identity, using two women’s faces to deliver one insult: that neither of them is quite what she claims to be, and neither is pretty, feminine or smiley enough to matter.
Multiple reports described the room’s reaction to that bit as silence. Even a post-event panel on CNN’s “State of the Union,” which featured a Republican congressman and a former Trump administration aide, unanimously agreed the president had bombed with his speech. It did not stop Trump. On Truth Social over the weekend, he had a second try at delivering his joke, using an image generated by artificial intelligence that placed Collins’ face onto Mulvaney’s body on a mock Bud Light can.
Collins didn’t take the bait. On Instagram, she posted an Eleanor Roosevelt line about nobody being able to make you feel inferior without your consent, alongside a note thanking her mentor Wolf Blitzer for the award with a reminder of why asking uncomfortable questions matters. On Monday’s “Daily Show,” she told host Jon Stewart she’d rather keep the focus on the reporting than on her own reaction, because turning it into a personal feud with the president is exactly the trap he wants her to fall into.
Collins has long been known for getting under his skin. During his first term, Trump clashed with her on numerous occasions in the briefing room and on social media, almost always after she challenged him for dodging questions or making false statements. In 2018, Collins was famously barred from attending an open-press event in the Rose Garden after daring to ask pointed questions about Michael Cohen and Russian President Vladimir Putin while serving as the pool reporter.
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When Stewart pressed her on the president’s fixation, Collins defended her record, emphasizing that she refuses to serve only one political audience. “I want anyone, from my family in Alabama to people in the White House to people in Washington, to be able to hear that answer or hear that question and think, ‘What is the answer to that?’” she said. “In terms of my reaction . . . it’s really not about me. And I don’t want it to be about my reaction. If you let it become about that, then it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of us. Instead, I think it’s more effective to remind people in those moments, when he is insulting me or when he is criticizing me, about the question I asked or the reporting that I did that he was so angry about. And the fact that I got an award for it really bothered him, clearly.”
On one level, watching Collins navigate these attacks offers a masterclass in professional composure. Regardless of political perspective, one has to acknowledge she is remarkably unflappable. Yet beneath this narrative of journalistic fortitude lies a far more transactional reality that defines modern Washington media. Collins has profited quite handsomely from her singular access to and conflict with power. In the mutually beneficial ecosystem of outrage that has come to define Donald Trump’s Washington, one hand washes the other.
Collins did not enter the dinner unaware of what was coming. In truth, from a brand-building perspective, such attacks are pure gold. She emerged from the weekend with half the media world and a chorus of Hollywood celebrities wildly applauding her bravery. This dynamic highlights the core problem with the era of the celebrity reporter, one of the most paradoxical developments in modern political media. We have built an ecosystem where personal confrontation with authority is parlayed into network stardom and lucrative contracts, all while the systemic threat to democratic norms continues unabated.
Look no further than Megyn Kelly, who famously parlayed a high-profile clash with Trump in 2016 as a Fox News reporter into a massive, multi-million-dollar (and short-lived) NBC contract only months later. Now a right-wing podcaster, Kelly went on her podcast this week and rationalized the attacks on Collins while complaining that the CNN star is “never nice to the president.” Using Trumpian language, Kelly argued that Collins is “always nasty” and that her questions carry “the most negative bent you could possibly go into the questioning with,” dismissing the president’s vulgar insults as mere “jazz” that all leaders throw around.
Then there is Collins’ own network. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that CNN leadership was “furious” over the president’s remarks and has discussed scaling back its footprint at next year’s dinner, or skipping it altogether — with one internal conversation reportedly framing the event as having become “a platform for making crude remarks at their employees’ expense.”
Such a move would be a step in the right direction. But where was that fury in the room, when it could have mattered? Where was the immediate pronouncement that they will not sit quietly while their journalists are demeaned in front of their colleagues?
Far from defending one of their own, they sat as participants.
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by Sophia Tesfaye
