Two Truth Social posts around midnight on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, marked President Donald 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. Trump is 80. Collins is 34.
The late-night posts came hours after Collins appeared on “Anderson Cooper 360°” to answer criticism Trump made of her and her network at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
“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.
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 had never declared it would stop covering him.
Trump’s second post went straight at the anchor, skipping the 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!” he wrote. MSDNC is Trump’s nickname for MSNBC.
Aide Flying With Trump
Natalie Harp, executive assistant to the president, was flying with Trump. Harp, 35, earns $150,000 a year, and she often supplies Trump with AI-generated material he later posts on social media.
Per CNN’s anonymous sources, Harp showed Trump a Politico graphic and television segments shortly before he announced the ban on Friday, Sept. 18. CNN also reported the move surprised many of his own advisers, and that Harp routinely hands Trump printed articles and often types the Truth Social posts he dictates.
The Video and Its Creator
The clip is titled “Day in the life of a CNN Reporter.” Comedian and content creator Patrick W. Cutler appears in it pulling on the dress, wig and lipstick, his character narrating in breezy fashion a workday spent inventing false rumors about the president. The video never indicates whom Cutler means to imitate.
Cutler has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and builds most of his content around sports. His own social media accounts carried the video first, and only afterward did it reach 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.
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.
Fight Over Press Access
A 14-day restraining order came down on Thursday, Sept. 24, from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee; it required the White House to restore access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Reporters from all three returned to the White House hours later.
Despite the Sept. 24 court order, CNN and MS NOW said their journalists were denied access to Xi Jinping’s state dinner arrival at the White House that day. CNN said the White House would allow only a photojournalist and an audio technician, barring a reporter and producer. MS NOW said journalist Laura Barrón-López, whose credentials the judge had reinstated, was also turned away.
Solidarity with the outlets Trump had banned led rival networks to withdraw from the White House television pool. On Sept. 24, the four other networks in the video pool were still refusing to participate, in solidarity, and no major American network aired live coverage of the Xi visit. Trump posted that TV networks “refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years.”
Normal television pool reporting resumed on the final day of Xi’s Washington visit, Friday, Sept. 25, after White House officials restored press access.
The access fight did not end there. The White House barred CNN from its turn as the designated pool network on Sept. 26, left it off Air Force One on Sept. 27 and dropped it from pool duty for Trump’s Oct. 1 trip to Texas and Oklahoma. CNN attorney Theodore Boutrous called the exclusion “a blatant violation of the First Amendment.” The news organizations have asked Kelly for a longer-lasting preliminary injunction before the restraining order expires Oct. 8.
A Feud That Escalated in July
Trump stepped up his needling of Collins at the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in July 2026, telling her colleagues as a joke that the face on the Bud Light can belonged not to Collins but to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Days later, Trump shared an AI-generated image on Truth Social placing Collins’ head on Mulvaney’s body. Collins received the WHCA Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, and he brushed it off as fake.
Conservatives boycotted Mulvaney in 2023 over her promotion of Bud Light as part of 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. 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.
Collins took up the dinner remarks on “The Daily Show,” saying her preference was to leave the spotlight on the reporting and on the answers that never come. Trump had called Collins an unhappy person once before, on Feb. 3, when she pressed him on the Epstein files at the White House; he dismissed her then as the worst reporter there and added that in 10 years he had never seen her smile.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, appearing on Collins’ CNN show “The Source,” told her that Americans across the board ought to be angered by the president’s treatment of her, and he framed the outpouring of support for the network as a rare moment of unity.
Trump kept up the attacks in a Time interview published Oct. 1, calling Collins “a very average person” and “the most unhappy young person I’ve ever seen.”
PR specialist Chad Teixeira told The Mirror US, in comments published Sept. 29, “With Kaitlan Collins, I actually think the worst thing she could do is get into a public back-and-forth with Trump.” He added: “The minute she starts trading insults with him, she becomes part of the story. Right now, she’s the journalist asking the questions. From a PR perspective, that’s exactly where she should stay.”
