Two Truth Social posts published around midnight on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, marked the latest escalation in President Donald Trump’s one-sided feud with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins. One of them was a comedy video of a man in a red dress, blond wig and red lipstick.
The posts went up moments before Marine One touched down at the White House’s new helipad. Trump is 80 years old. Collins is 34.
Flying with the president was Natalie Harp, 35, executive assistant to the president, who earns $150,000 a year. Harp often supplies Trump with AI-generated material that he later posts on social media.
Trump’s late-night posts came hours after Collins used an appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360°” to answer his criticism of her and her network at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
The second post went straight at the anchor, with no costume comedy. “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!” Trump wrote. “MSDNC” is Trump’s nickname for MSNBC.
The Video and Its Creator
The clip Trump posted is titled “Day in the life of a CNN Reporter.” It features comedian and content creator Patrick W. Cutler putting on the dress, wig and lipstick. The character he plays breezily narrates a workday given over to inventing false rumors about the president. The clip never indicates whom Cutler is imitating.
The clip first went up on Cutler’s own social media accounts, reaching the president’s feed only afterward. He has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and builds most of his content around sports. He had previously run the same footage with different audio under the title “Dallas Cowboys fans getting ready for opening night,” with his character predicting a Super Bowl and picturing himself as quarterback Dak Prescott.
Cutler says he has no idea how the clip found its way to the president. “I think it’s hilarious Trump reposted my video,” he said in a statement to the Daily Beast.
Collins Answers on CNN
On “Anderson Cooper 360°,” Collins said the United Nations granted her media accreditation despite Trump’s ban on CNN. One claim Trump made to her at the U.N. and then repeated online was inaccurate, she noted: her network never declared it would stop covering him. She added that doing the job remains CNN’s responsibility.
“The president is the one who’s trying to dictate how we cover him,” Collins said.
Courts and Colleagues Push Back
Rival networks pulled out of the White House television pool in solidarity with the outlets Trump had banned. A Trump nominee, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, then issued a 14-day restraining order on Thursday, Sept. 24, requiring the White House to restore access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Reporters from all three returned to the White House hours later. The White House has since dropped CNN from press pool duty again, including for Trump’s Oct. 1 trip to Texas and Oklahoma, and the Justice Department has asked the court to let it reinstate the ban. Kelly scheduled a hearing on the outlets’ request for a preliminary injunction for Thursday, Oct. 8, the day the restraining order expires.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, appearing on Collins’ CNN show “The Source,” told her the way the president had treated her ought to anger Americans across the board, and he framed the outpouring of support for the network as a rare moment of unity.
Bud Light Jokes and an Award
The president stepped up his needling of the anchor at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in July 2026. At the dinner, in front of her colleagues, Trump joked that the Bud Light can carried the face not of Collins but of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Days later, Trump shared an AI-generated image on Truth Social placing Collins’ head on Mulvaney’s body.
Trump also dismissed as fake the WHCA Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure that Collins received.
A March Madness campaign promoting Bud Light brought Mulvaney a conservative boycott in 2023, and musician Kid Rock was among those who piled on. Anheuser-Busch publicly acknowledged the sharp decline in sales that the fallout helped cause. In a social media post Sunday, July 26, Mulvaney responded that the mockery placed her alongside some of the most brilliant and empathetic people around.
“The Daily Show” gave Collins the venue to address the dinner remarks, where she said her preference was to keep attention on the journalism itself and on the questions that go unanswered.
An exchange in February, when Collins pressed him on the Epstein files at the White House, preceded the president’s description of her as an unhappy person. Trump dismissed her as the worst reporter there, adding that in 10 years he had never seen her smile. In an Oct. 1 interview with Time, Trump called her “the most unhappy young person I’ve ever seen.”
