This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
President Donald Trump finally got his long-delayed turn at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, and he used a chunk of it to needle CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in front of the entire room.
The 2026 gathering, pushed back three months after a gunman opened fire in the lobby of the Washington Hilton during the original April event, was finally held Friday, July 24, at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C., under noticeably tighter security than in years past.
Trump opened by acknowledging the unusual road it took to get everyone back in a ballroom together. “As I said three months ago, the show must go on,” he told the crowd, a nod to the shooting that cut the April dinner short just minutes after it began and sent Trump and attendees scrambling for the exits.
That callback set the tone for a night that swung between self-deprecating jokes and pointed jabs at the very journalists the dinner exists to honor.
It did not take long for Collins to become the evening’s main event. The CNN anchor had just picked up the WHCA’s Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure in the broadcast category, recognition tied to her reporting on the tense 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Rather than let the honor pass with a polite nod, Trump used his own remarks to question whether she deserved it at all. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” he said, before pivoting hard.
“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.”
Trump Tells Collins To Smile, Again
From there, Trump leaned into a line of attack he has aimed at Collins before, telling the room she rarely cracks a smile and suggesting she ought to lighten up given her position at the network.
“But she’s a young, attractive woman. She never smiles,” he said, according to multiple outlets present at the dinner. “I said, Kaitlan, 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.” It was not the first time the president has zeroed in on Collins’s expression rather than her reporting.
He made a nearly identical remark to her directly during a February Oval Office exchange about the Jeffrey Epstein files, and had previously called her “stupid and nasty” in December, so Friday’s comment landed as a rerun of a running feud rather than a fresh insult.
Collins, for her part, has already addressed the smiling fixation head-on in earlier interviews, making clear she sees little humor in being told to grin while asking serious questions.
Speaking previously about the February exchange, she said she did not think it was “a controversial opinion” that a reporter should not be smiling while asking about sexual assault survivors tied to the Epstein case, adding that the moment resonated with a lot of women who have faced similar comments in professional settings.
That context made Friday’s repeat performance land as less of a spontaneous joke and more of a pattern the CNN anchor has already pushed back on publicly.
The line that drew the most groans in the room, though, was still to come. Trump compared Collins to actress and transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, joking that he initially thought Collins had landed a major new sponsorship before realizing “it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.”
He added, seemingly for good measure, that “Dylan Mulvaney cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap” and called the 2023 campaign “the worst commercial ever made, by the way.”
Reports from inside the Waldorf Astoria ballroom described the joke landing to near silence, a notable contrast to the kind of laugh lines a correspondents’ dinner speech is typically built around.
CNN And The WHCA Push Back
Collins was not the only journalist Trump singled out. He also took aim at Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Dawsey, calling him “unhireable” while simultaneously acknowledging how prolific a writer he is, and turned his attention to CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon as the speech wore on.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not escape the ribbing either, with Trump working in jokes about him during the portion of the night centered on the dinner itself.
By the time Trump wrapped up, he had spent close to an hour weaving between comedy bits, grievances about press coverage, and a running tally of the outlets and reporters he feels have wronged him, continuing a media feud that has defined much of his time back in office.
The pushback arrived almost immediately. CNN Worldwide chairman and CEO Mark Thompson issued a statement while Trump was still at the podium, making clear the network was not going to let the moment pass quietly.
“We stand by our journalists and the integrity and fair mindedness with which the CNN team reports the news,” Thompson said, adding that “honest, accurate journalism may sometimes irritate politicians, but our right to report and present that reporting to the public without government interference is fully protected by the U.S. Constitution.”
It was a direct, unmistakable defense of Collins and the rest of the network’s White House team, delivered in real time rather than after the fact.
Outgoing WHCA president Weijia Jiang took the stage right after Trump finished and offered her own rebuttal, though she kept it warm rather than combative.
“I just want to congratulate all of our award winners again,” Jiang told the room. “My friend Kaitlan, who has a beautiful smile, and Josh Dawsey, who is one of the most prolific journalists of our time.”
The line drew a noticeably different reaction than Trump’s material had, and it framed Collins and Dawsey’s award-winning work as the actual headline of the evening rather than the president’s commentary on Collins’s demeanor.
A Return To The Podium After A Decade Away
Friday marked Trump’s first appearance at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner since 2015, breaking more than a decade of boycotts that spanned his first term and the early part of his second.
First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were all absent, with the White House citing scheduling conflicts rather than any deliberate snub.
Trump was flanked throughout the evening by Jiang and incoming WHCA president Jacqui Heinrich, and the night also included a video segment poking fun at his relationship with the press and a performance from mentalist Oz Pearlman, during which Trump tossed a “Trump 2028” cap into the crowd.
For an event still recovering from the trauma of the April shooting, the 2026 dinner ended up delivering exactly the kind of tension its organizers may have hoped to avoid, with the traditional lighthearted roast overshadowed by personal jabs, a joke that fell flat, and a public rebuttal from the network at the center of it all.
Whether the moment fades into the long list of Trump-versus-press flashpoints or becomes another chapter in his specific back-and-forth with Collins likely depends on what happens the next time the two cross paths in a briefing room rather than a ballroom.
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