CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Responds to Trump’s WHCD Attack: ‘Not Surprised’

Three days after Kaitlan Collins was insulted by Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, she appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and addressed his digs. At the dinner, which was rescheduled from April after a gunman opened fire on the original date, Collins took home an award for her coverage of Trump’s meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy on CNN.

When Trump took the stage to speak later in the night, he took aim at Collins. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” he said. “It was all about me. It was a fake. She shouldn’t get the award. It was a fake. But I don’t mind. I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake. There’s no question about it.”

He also compared her to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, adding, “I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.”

.@KaitlanCollins on Trump’s verbal attacks:

“It’s really not about me, and I don’t want it to be about my reaction. … In those moments it’s important to put the reminder back on the work, on the question, and on the non-answers that we get.” pic.twitter.com/DY009dNy3k

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) July 28, 2026

It was the latest of Trump’s many attacks on the reporter, so this was nothing new for Collins. “I’ve covered Trump for 10 years, so I’ve listened to pretty much all his speeches for 10 years with very little exception,” she told Jon Stewart. “So I think it’s actually helpful for other people to be able to listen to them in their entirety, which people don’t really that much these days. I was not surprised when he insulted me. That happens pretty much regularly inside the Oval Office. This was just a bigger venue where ti was happening.”

She then added, “What was surprising to me was the room was filled with a lot of his staffers, his allies, his cabinet, Republicans in Congress … and it was so quiet in the room during the president’s remarks.”

Stewart joked, “Because of how much they respect him?” and Collins smirked, “Who’s to say?”

Collins stayed levelheaded about the situation, noting, “It’s really not about me and I don’t want it to be about my reaction. I think if you let it become about that, then it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of us. And instead, I think it’s more effective to remind people in those moments where he is insulting me, or he is criticizing me, about the question I asked or the reporting I did that he was so angry about in this moment. And the fact that I got an award for it really bothered him, clearly.”