President Donald Trump escalated his one-sided feud with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins with two midnight Truth Social posts — one of them a comedy video of a man in a red dress, blond wig and red lipstick — that went up moments before Marine One touched down at the White House’s new helipad.
The 80-year-old president’s late-night salvo arrived hours after Collins, 34, used an appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360°” to answer his criticism of her and her network at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
Flying with him was Natalie Harp, special assistant to the president and executive assistant to the president. Harp, 35, who earns $150,000 a year, often supplies Trump with AI-generated material that he later posts on social media.
The Video That Landed at Midnight
The clip, titled “Day in the life of a CNN Reporter,” shows comedian and content creator Patrick W. Cutler putting on the dress, wig and lipstick while his character breezily narrates a workday devoted to inventing false rumors about the president. There is no indication of who Cutler is attempting to imitate.
Trump’s second post skipped the costume comedy and went straight at the anchor. He wrote on Truth Social: “All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like Third Rate ‘Reporter,’ Kaitlan Collins, of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like Lunatics, in the Press Area, at the United Nations? Why was she there? She’s got a ‘TRUMP’ addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC. They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented!” MSDNC is his nickname for MSNBC.
A Feud With a Bud Light Backstory
Trump’s needling of Collins goes back to the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in July 2026, where he joked in front of her colleagues that the face on the Bud Light can was not Collins but transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Days later, he shared an AI-generated image on Truth Social placing Collins’ head on Mulvaney’s body. He also brushed off the WHCA Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure that Collins received, calling it fake.
Mulvaney drew a conservative boycott in 2023 after promoting Bud Light as part of a March Madness campaign, with musician Kid Rock among those who piled on. The fallout contributed to a sharp decline in sales that Anheuser-Busch publicly acknowledged. Mulvaney responded in a social media post Sunday, July 26, saying the mockery placed her alongside some of the most brilliant and empathetic people around.
Collins addressed the dinner remarks on “The Daily Show,” saying she would rather keep the focus on the reporting and on the answers she does not get. The president’s description of her as an unhappy person follows an exchange in February, when Collins pressed him on the Epstein files at the White House and Trump dismissed her as the worst reporter there, adding that in 10 years he had never seen her smile.
Collins Answers From the Anchor Desk
On Cooper’s program, Collins said the United Nations granted her media accreditation despite Trump’s ban on CNN, and she flagged an inaccuracy in what he said to her at the U.N. and then repeated online: her network never declared it would stop covering him. “The president is the one who’s trying to dictate how we cover him,” Collins said, adding that doing the job remains CNN’s responsibility.
She has not been the only one pushing back. Rival networks pulled out of the White House television pool in solidarity with the outlets Trump has banned. And Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, appearing on Collins’ CNN show “The Source,” told her that the way the president had treated her ought to anger Americans across the board, framing the outpouring of support for the network as a rare moment of unity.
The Comedian Behind the Costume
Cutler, who has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and builds most of his content around sports, posted the video to his social media accounts before it made its way to the president’s feed. He had previously run the same footage with different audio under the title “Dallas Cowboys fans getting ready for opening night,” his character predicting a Super Bowl and picturing himself as quarterback Dak Prescott.
“I think it’s hilarious Trump reposted my video,” Cutler said in a statement to the Daily Beast. He added that he has no idea how the clip found its way to the president.