Dylan Mulvaney Responds to Trump's Comments About Her and Kaitlan Collins at the White House Correspondents' Dinner
At a dinner meant to honor a shooting survivor and defend a free press, the president revived a debunked 2023 Bud Light claim. Mulvaney used her response to talk directly to trans and nonbinary people
Dylan Mulvaney had a message for Donald Trump this week: keep talking.
The trans actress and content creator posted a nearly four-minute video on Sunday, answering the president’s jokes about her two nights earlier at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “The president said my name in his speech four times on Friday night,” she said in the video. Instead of asking him to stop, she used the moment to talk to her supporters instead of to him.
The exchange happened at a dinner that was supposed to be about something else entirely.
How a Shooting Rewrote This Year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner
The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was originally set for April 25, 2026, at the Washington Hilton. It never happened that night. A gunman identified as 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, opened fire outside the ballroom. Secret Service Police Officer Victor Gonzalez was shot in the chest and survived because he wore a bulletproof vest. He engaged the shooter to protect roughly 2,000 people inside, according to the Deseret News.
The WHCA postponed the dinner, then rescheduled it as a smaller gathering on Friday, July 24, at the Waldorf Astoria Washington, D.C., built around the Old Post Office building Trump’s company once operated as a hotel before selling it in 2022. The night was framed as a tribute to Gonzalez and to hotel staff who stayed on duty during the shooting. It also marked the first White House Correspondents’ Dinner Trump has attended as president. He skipped every one during his first term.
Trump opened by joking about the bulletproof vests some attendees wore and said, “In America we do not yield to political violence,” according to Axios. Then his tone shifted.
Trump’s Bud Light Joke About Dylan Mulvaney and Kaitlan Collins
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had just accepted the Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for broadcast, for CNN’s reporting on the tense February 2025 Oval Office meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Just the News. Collins wrote on X that she was “honored to win this award for our coverage of President Zelensky’s historic visit to the Oval Office.”
Trump used her win as a setup. “I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney,” he said, reviving the 2023 backlash over Mulvaney’s brief partnership with the beer brand.
He added that Mulvaney “cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap,” called the partnership “the worst commercial ever made,” and said he “wouldn’t want to hire Dylan anytime soon,” according to the Hollywood Reporter. Earlier in the speech, he told Collins, “You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile,” per The Advocate.
Collins later said she didn’t want the moment to become personal. “It’s really not about me,” she told reporters, adding she’d rather remind people “about the question I asked or the reporting that I did,” according to Newsweek. CNN backed her in a statement, calling her “an exceptional, trusted journalist” with “real strength and tenacity.”
Fact-Checking Trump’s $35 Billion Mulvaney Claim
Two of Trump’s core claims don’t hold up.
First, Mulvaney never starred in a Bud Light commercial. In 2023, the brand sent her a single personalized can marking her first year since coming out as trans, as part of one sponsored Instagram post. It was never a nationally aired TV commercial, and her image never appeared on cans sold to the public, according to The Advocate.
Second, no credible source has verified a $35 billion loss tied to Mulvaney or the boycott that followed. Snopes found Anheuser-Busch’s market cap fell roughly $6.33 billion over one week in April 2023, but concluded “there was no demonstrable connection” between that dip and the boycott specifically, since stock prices move for many reasons. A year later, CNN Business reported the boycott likely cost the company just over $1 billion in lost sales, a real but far smaller number than the one Trump cited from the podium.
Trump’s Anderson Cooper Joke Was Part of a Pattern That Night
Mulvaney wasn’t the only target. Trump also told CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, who is gay, “I like Anderson, actually, because he’s covered me well for many years. Then he went bad as soon as I went for politics…. Ya know he’s got a different persuasion than me, in many ways,” according to The Advocate He also called Don Lemon “the dumbest man on television” and referred to CNN’s Jake Tapper as “Fake Tapper.”
Coverage of how the room reacted splits along predictable lines. CNN Business and an Alabama outlet both described Trump’s jokes about Collins as landing to scattered laughter or silence. Conservative outlets covered the same night by mocking Mulvaney’s response instead. Both things can be true at once: a room can go quiet on a joke and a video can still go viral days later.
Dylan Mulvaney’s Response: “More Powerful Than I Even Knew”
Mulvaney posted her response on Sunday, the same day Trump shared an AI-altered image on Truth Social that placed Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body from the 2023 Bud Light photo. In her video, she congratulated Collins directly. “I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way, and I hope that she keeps doing all the great work,” she said.
She said she’d been “flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile” since 2023. “Yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later,” she said. “It seems to me that I might be like the one that got away for these men. Like, I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.”
She reframed the mockery as proof of something else. “Maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually like the greatest compliment of all,” she said, before asking why it matters so much to Trump that she not succeed. “What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience, and they want to use their power to take away my freedom.”
She said that freedom isn’t something Trump can give or take. “My freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self,” she said. “Sharing that with the world, it’s just icing on the cake.”
Dylan Mulvaney’s Three Asks for Trans and Nonbinary Supporters
Mulvaney closed the video with three requests.
First, to allies: “We need you to stand up for us, vote for us, donate to our causes, hire us, and support the businesses who hire us. But most importantly, love us. That is what we need more than anything right now, publicly and proudly.”
Second, to young trans and nonbinary viewers: “I need you to hold onto every piece of yourself tightly, especially the parts that they are trying to make you feel guilty about or trying to scare you into abandoning. And I need you to find people who will help you carry those pieces into a kinder day.”
Third, on the criticism itself: “When they tell you that you look like a trans woman, wear it like a medal.” She referenced Hillary Duff’s 2008 anti-slur PSAs with GLSEN and the Ad Council, telling men who get mocked for being attracted to trans women to shut down the insult the same way. “And to the dolls,” she added, using slang some trans women use for one another, “let’s have each other’s backs.”
She ended where she started. “And lastly, to the president: thank you for reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew,” she said, before dancing to trans musician Shea Diamond’s song “I Am America.”
On Saturday, before any of this, Collins had posted her own message on Instagram: photos from the dinner and her award, captioned with a line from Eleanor Roosevelt. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
If this is the kind of story you want more of, stories that fact-check the president in real time and center trans people as more than a punchline, subscribe to The Queer Agenda. And if you know someone who needs the reminder that mockery from the top doesn't get the last word, send them Mulvaney's three asks.
Sources: Axios, CNN Business, Deseret News, Hollywood Reporter, Just the News, Newsweek, Snopes, The Advocate, CNN Business (2024), Kaitlan Collins on X