Two Truth Social posts around midnight on Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026, marked the latest escalation by President Donald Trump in his one-sided feud with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins. Trump is 80 years old; Collins is 34. One of the two posts 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. Flying with Trump was Natalie Harp, executive assistant to the president. Harp, 35, earns $150,000 a year and often supplies Trump with AI-generated material that he later posts on social media.
The clip is titled “Day in the life of a CNN Reporter.” Comedian and content creator Patrick W. Cutler stars in it, pulling on the dress, wig and lipstick as his character breezily narrates a workday spent inventing false rumors about the president. Who Cutler is attempting to imitate is never indicated.
Cutler has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and builds most of his content around sports. The video landed on his own social media accounts first and only later reached the president’s feed. The same footage had already appeared 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,” Cutler said in a statement to the Daily Beast.
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!” Trump wrote. MSDNC is Trump’s nickname for MSNBC.
Collins Answers on CNN
The late-night posts came hours after Collins used an appearance on “Anderson Cooper 360°” to answer Trump’s criticism of her and her network at the United Nations headquarters in New York. Collins said the United Nations granted her media accreditation despite Trump’s ban on CNN. Her network, she noted, never declared it would stop covering him — an inaccuracy she flagged in what Trump said to her at the U.N. and then repeated online. 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 on the program.
Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, appearing on Collins’ CNN show “The Source,” told her that Americans of every stripe should be angered by the president’s treatment of her. He cast the outpouring of support for the network as a rare moment of unity.
PR specialist Chad Teixeira, speaking to The Mirror US, cautioned Collins against responding to Trump. “With Kaitlan Collins, I actually think the worst thing she could do is get into a public back-and-forth with Trump,” Teixeira said. 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.”
Judge’s Order and Confiscated Badges
ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC, the other four networks in the White House broadcast pool, suspended their participation in solidarity with CNN after the ban began Sept. 19.
A 14-day restraining order came down on Thursday, Sept. 24, from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump nominee, ordering the White House to restore access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Reporters from all three returned to the White House hours later.
A Secret Service agent confiscated the journalists’ credentials on the morning of Thursday, Sept. 24, the news outlets said in a court filing asking for an immediate hearing over what appeared to be the White House ignoring the court order. The administration said in its own filing that it had taken time to begin reinstating badges. The reporters were allowed back in by midday.
The White House still refused access to certain CNN and MSNBC reporters assigned to cover the state dinner for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. CNN said that roughly an hour before Xi was due to arrive, access was still being withheld. White House officials restored press access on Friday, Sept. 25, and reporting resumed as normal on the final day of Xi’s Washington visit.
The standoff has continued since. The White House barred CNN from Air Force One on Saturday, Sept. 26, for Trump’s trip to a college football game in Tennessee, and on Wednesday, Sept. 30, it removed the network from the pool for the president’s Thursday, Oct. 1, trip to Texas and Oklahoma. Kelly has scheduled a hearing on the outlets’ request for a preliminary injunction for Thursday, Oct. 8, at 11 a.m. ET, the day the restraining order expires.
Roots in a Dinner Joke
The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner in July 2026 is where Trump first began needling Collins. At that dinner, the president told 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. He brushed off the WHCA Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure that Collins received, calling it fake.
A conservative boycott hit Mulvaney in 2023 over her promotion of Bud Light as part of a March Madness campaign, and musician Kid Rock joined the pile-on. Sales then fell sharply, a decline Anheuser-Busch publicly acknowledged the fallout had contributed to. 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.
On “The Daily Show,” Collins took up the dinner remarks, explaining that her preference is to keep attention on the reporting itself and on the questions that go unanswered. Trump’s description of Collins as an unhappy person follows a February exchange in which she pressed him on the Epstein files at the White House. Trump dismissed her then as the worst reporter there, adding that in 10 years he had never seen her smile.