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President Donald Trump escalated his attacks on the news media over the weekend, following a blistering address at the rescheduled White House Correspondents' Association dinner by posting an edited image mocking CNN's Kaitlan Collins - a personal jab later amplified by an official White House social media account.
Trump posted the edited image to Truth Social on Sunday, replacing transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney's face in a mock Bud Light advertisement with Collins's, in a nod to the beer brand's 2023 partnership with Mulvaney - a campaign that triggered a right-wing boycott.
Trump's broadsides against the press inspired a new round of calls from media critics to end the dinner, arguing that the president's particularly contentious relationship with the news media exposes incongruities surrounding an event designed to honor reporting on the executive branch.
Trump - who, after a gunman interrupted the initial dinner in April, had promised to deliver "a speech of love" - critiqued a litany of journalists in his address Friday night, including CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper.
But he focused his ire on CNN anchor and chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, telling her to "just smile" - employing a common misogynistic trope - before likening her appearance to that of Mulvaney, a figure who has dominated culture-war headlines.
Trump's personal attacks on reporters have been a defining feature of his combative style of politics. During the 2016 election campaign, he said then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had "blood coming out of her wherever" when she aggressively questioned him during a presidential debate. He also mocked Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter with a disability. More recently, he referred to a female reporter as "Piggy."
The Friday remarks came as the Trump administration ratchets up its confrontational approach to the press. The Justice Department during Trump's second term has sought subpoenas for journalists from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and other outlets - though each effort has been withdrawn after pushback.
Trump has not only insulted numerous journalists, news executives and media organizations but has sued many of them, too, while his Federal Communications Commission has investigated whether they're acting in the "public interest."
Columbia Journalism Review's Jem Bartholomew simply called last week's correspondents' dinner "an embarrassment." So did Tom Jones of Poynter, an institute focused on journalism. Jon Passantino of the newsletter Status described Trump's speech as "laced with vile invective." He said the president's remarks succeeded in "stripping away any pretense that the evening would serve as a celebration of the First Amendment."
Margaret Sullivan, a press critic and former Washington Post columnist, said that the dinner was a "predictable disgrace" and that journalists should have stood up in unison and walked out.
"Our mission is to defend the First Amendment rights of White House correspondents to report on the president without fear or favor," Peter Baker, the New York Times's chief White House correspondent, wrote Saturday on X. "Unfortunately last night did not advance that cause. Time to rethink the dinner." (The Times has long sent journalists to cover the event but does not let them attend as guests.)
On Friday, a CNN spokesperson called Collins "an exceptional, trusted journalist" who was honored "for her depth of knowledge and the context she provides to audiences all over the world."
"The liberal media can dish it but they can't take it," White House spokesman Davis Ingle wrote in a statement Monday.
Mulvaney responded to Trump's comments with a video on TikTok congratulating Collins and saying it's an honor to be compared to her in any way.
Mulvaney added that she wasn't entirely bothered by being on the president's "diss track" during the speech. "Maybe, being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually the greatest compliment of all," she said.
On CNN's airwaves, co-anchors John Berman and Laura Coates read CNN's statement supporting Collins, as well as one from Chairman and CEO Mark Thompson asserting his support for all of the network's journalists and their constitutional right to report without government interference.
The original dinner in April was billed as a must-watch: the first that Trump would attend as president after years of boycotting it.
But the event was interrupted by a gunman, Cole Tomas Allen, who was later indicted by a federal grand jury on four felony counts.
While Trump and the White House Correspondents' Association promised to get a new dinner on the books, some critics told The Post the redo was ill-advised.
"When we can no longer be sure that the president we're inviting to dinner really does believe in a free press - when that president in fact overtly threatens press freedom - why are we sharing a meal with him?" Kathy Kiely, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri, said at the time.
CNN is at the center of a media megamerger, with Trump ally David Ellison's Paramount Skydance set to buy CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery for $110 billion, a deal blessed by the Trump administration's antitrust regulators at the Justice Department. That deal is on pause after a federal judge temporarily halted it following a legal challenge from 12 Democratic state attorneys general.
Paramount Skydance said Friday that it had agreed to delay the merger until as late as July 2027, placing CNN's future in limbo.
The president's tone and tenor toward CNN have not endeared him to its staff.
"The president [was] just talking about the respect he has for journalists in this room," Coates said on air Friday night. "Frankly, I didn't see much of it in the last hour of his speech."
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Previously:
• Voice of America's exiled journos must find meaning in work outside newsroom