Trump Used the Correspondents' Dinner to Take Shots at Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon

Two words did most of the work: “different persuasion.”

That was President Donald Trump on Friday night, deep into a rambling hour-plus set at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, explaining what separates him from Anderson Cooper. He never spelled out what he meant. He didn't need to.

“I like Anderson actually because he's covered me well for many years, and he went bad as soon as I went for politics,” Trump said, as The Advocate reported. “But for years he loved the interview. I did so many interviews with him, and he was great, but he's got a little different persuasion than me in many ways actually.”

Cooper has been out since 2012, and there are not many openly gay men in American TV news carrying his profile. Trump offered no explanation of the phrase and moved on.

He landed next on Don Lemon — also gay, also formerly of CNN, and a Trump target for years now. “We had a contest for who had the lowest ratings and the lowest IQ on television,” Trump said. “And that was actually Don Lemon, I think.” Then came the line he has been recycling for years: “When I said that he's the dumbest man on television, I said, when you say some things, you never make a comeback.”

Lemon left CNN in 2023 and now publishes on his own. He also happens to be on the cover of The Advocate's current print issue — so the president spent part of his evening insulting a man the gay press is actively celebrating.

The Bud Light bit

Things got genuinely strange when Trump turned to CNN's Kaitlan Collins, who had just accepted the association's broadcast award for her reporting on the 2025 Oval Office confrontation with Volodymyr Zelensky. He told the room her award was fake. Then he told her to fix her face. “You should be a happy person,” he said. “So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.”

From there he claimed he'd had to break it to Collins that the woman on the Bud Light can wasn't her — it was Dylan Mulvaney. He put the damage at $35 billion in market value — Variety’s transcript of the same line has him saying $35 million, which tells you how seriously anyone in the room was tracking the math — and called the partnership “the worst commercial ever made.”

The story he told is not what happened. There was no conventional Bud Light commercial with Mulvaney in it. In 2023 the company sent her one personalized can marking a year since she shared her transition publicly; it turned up in a single sponsored post and was never stocked on a shelf. The backlash was real — Bud Light’s sales fell sharply and it lost its spot as the country’s top-selling beer for a stretch — and Mulvaney has since said the company left her to absorb months of threats and harassment without defending her.

The room it happened in

This dinner existed at all because the last one didn't finish. April's gathering at the Washington Hilton collapsed when a gunman pushed past a checkpoint and started shooting; Secret Service officer Victor Gonzales took a round in his vest. Friday's do-over at the Waldorf Astoria — the building that traded as the Trump International Hotel until 2022 — ran smaller and tighter, roughly 700 guests against the usual 2,600, and part of the point was to honor Gonzales and the Hilton staff.

So: a room convened to defend a free press after someone shot at it, and the president used his hour to insinuate about one journalist's sexuality, call another one stupid, and hold up a trans woman as a warning about who not to hire.

The pushback came fast, if gently. Outgoing association president Weijia Jiang took the podium afterward and told the crowd Collins has “a beautiful smile.” CNN chief executive Mark Thompson issued a statement while Trump was still speaking: “Honest, accurate journalism may sometimes irritate politicians, but our right to report and present that reporting to the public without government interference is fully protected by the U.S. Constitution.”

Trump never did say what Cooper's “persuasion” was supposed to be. That's the part worth sitting with. In 2026 the jab still gets delivered in code — and it still lands.

Update: Sunday

He wasn't finished. On Sunday, Trump posted an AI-generated image to Truth Social putting Collins' face onto Mulvaney's body — built from the 2023 video in which Mulvaney promoted Bud Light in an Audrey Hepburn-styled outfit, as the Daily Beast reported. He attached no caption and offered no explanation.

Collins answered on Instagram without naming him. She posted photos from the night, credited Wolf Blitzer — “my friend and mentor” — for handing her the award, and wrote that the best part of the evening was “reminding everyone why the First Amendment—and asking uncomfortable questions that people in power don't like—matters.” The last slide was a line from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Asked again, CNN pointed back to what it had already said on Friday.