Two Truth Social posts around midnight on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, marked Trump’s latest escalation of his one-sided feud with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins. One post 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. President Donald Trump is 80 years old; Collins is 34.
Comedian and content creator Patrick W. Cutler appears in the clip, titled “Day in the life of a CNN Reporter,” pulling on the dress, wig and lipstick as his character breezily narrates a workday given over to inventing false rumors about the president. Who Cutler is attempting to imitate is never indicated.
The costume comedy was gone from Trump’s second post, which took aim directly at the anchor. “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!” he wrote. MSDNC is Trump’s nickname for MSNBC.
The late-night posts came hours after Collins answered his criticism of her and her network at the United Nations headquarters in New York, in an appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360°.” “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. The United Nations had accredited her as media despite Trump’s ban on CNN, she said on the program, where she also pointed to an error in what Trump said to her at the U.N. and then repeated online: her network never declared it would stop covering him.
The Credential Fight
A Secret Service agent confiscated the credentials of CNN, MS NOW and Politico journalists on the morning of Sept. 24, despite a court order requiring the White House to restore the outlets’ access.
The outlets filed for an immediate hearing. The administration said it needed time to find, reactivate and deliver the badges, a process that took over two hours before reporters were let in by midday.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee, had issued a 14-day restraining order on Thursday, Sept. 24, requiring the White House to restore access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico.
Also on Sept. 24, CNN and MS NOW said their journalists were denied access to Xi Jinping’s state dinner arrival even after reinstatement. CNN said the White House allowed only a photojournalist and audio technician, barring a reporter and producer. MS NOW said journalist Laura Barron-Lopez, whose credentials the judge restored, was denied entry.
Solidarity with the outlets Trump had banned drove Rival networks to withdraw from the White House television pool. As of Sept. 24, no major American network aired live coverage of the Xi visit, and the four other pool networks still refused to shoot video. Trump posted that the networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years.”
The Comedian Behind the Clip
Cutler has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and builds most of his content around sports. The video went up on his own social media accounts first and only later reached the president’s feed. The same footage had already run once before with different audio, titled “Dallas Cowboys fans getting ready for opening night,” his character predicting a Super Bowl and picturing himself as quarterback Dak Prescott.
Cutler said 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.
The Aide and the Livestream
Natalie Harp, executive assistant to the president, was flying with Trump. Harp earns $150,000 a year and, at 35, frequently hands Trump AI-generated material that he later posts on social media.
Citing anonymous sources, CNN reported that Harp presented Trump with a Politico graphic and television segments hours before he announced the ban on Sept. 18. The same report said she routinely hands him printed articles and often types the Truth Social posts he dictates, and that the ban surprised many of his advisers.
The White House launched “Trump TV Essentials,” a 24/7 YouTube livestream of Trump speeches and events, on the evening of Monday, Sept. 21. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, speaking before it came online, said it would be “quite literally state-run TV.” At the Sept. 21 helipad ribbon-cutting, Trump’s remarks were inaudible on Newsmax’s live broadcast because no press pool microphone was present. “Okay, so there is no microphone because the pool cameras aren’t there, so maybe this is one example of it backfiring just a little bit,” the Newsmax presenter said on the air.
How the Feud Began
The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in July 2026 was where Trump’s needling of Collins started; in front of her colleagues he joked that the face on the Bud Light can belonged not to Collins but to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. On Truth Social days later, he shared an AI-generated image that placed Collins’ head on Mulvaney’s body. Collins had received the WHCA Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, and he brushed that off too, calling it fake.
Conservatives boycotted Mulvaney in 2023 over her promotion of Bud Light in a March Madness campaign, and musician Kid Rock was among those who piled on. Anheuser-Busch publicly acknowledged the sharp decline in sales that the fallout helped cause. 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,” where she said the reporting itself, and the answers she does not get, are what she would rather have people look at. Trump’s description of Collins as an unhappy person follows an exchange in February. Collins had 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.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, appearing on Collins’ CNN show “The Source,” said Americans across the board ought to be angered by the way the president had treated her, and he framed the outpouring of support for the network as a rare moment of unity.
