The Punchline
Dylan Mulvaney did nothing wrong. That's the point.
I wrote yesterday about the correspondents’ dinner and the press corps that sat through it. The room was the story, and I stand by that. But one bit from Friday night has been stuck in my head all weekend, and I want to stay on it for a minute.
At one point during his speech, Trump got around to Kaitlan Collins, who had just accepted the WHCA’s award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure from Wolf Blitzer, which she earned covering the Oval Office Zelensky blowup last year. Trump congratulated her, sort of: the award was fake, he told the room, and she shouldn’t have won it. She never smiles, he went on, and she really should, considering what a nice position she has over at CNN, which he reminded everyone is fake news. “So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.” (He ran the same routine on her in the Oval Office in February, mid-question about Epstein’s survivors.)
Then the bit. He’d heard Collins had landed a big sponsorship, except “it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney.” Mulvaney, he claimed, cost Bud Light “$35 billion in market cap.” And he closed with a line about how he’d never want to give her a job.
On Sunday morning he posted a follow-up to his personal Truth Social account: an AI-edited image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body, lifted from the 2023 Bud Light video.
And look at what that image actually shows. A smiling woman in a black dress and gloves, holding a beer, a few more cans lined up on the table. That’s the entire picture. The insult is something the viewer has to supply.
Everybody supplied it. That’s what I keep coming back to. The bit bombed, sure. But nobody in that ballroom needed the joke explained, and nobody leaned over to ask what he meant. Neither did anyone who read about it the next morning. The joke has exactly one moving part, the assumption that being compared to a trans woman is a step down, and that assumption is so widely shared in 2026 that the president of the United States can build a punchline on it, on live television, without ever saying it out loud.
Then came the objections. They ran on the same assumption.
“Apologize to Kaitlan, specifically”
The most instructive objection came from Rahm Emanuel, 2028-curious and on CNN’s payroll as a contributor. Trump, he told the Washington Examiner, “should apologize to Kaitlan Collins specifically,” and to all the journalists he insults. Mulvaney’s name doesn’t come up. This is the same guy who gave Megyn Kelly a flat “Can a man become a woman? No,” then stood by it for months, and who told NPR “That’s not what I said” when asked whether that denies trans people exist. (He does.) (I’ve written about Rahm before.)
CNN stood behind its anchor, calling her “an exceptional, trusted journalist.” Every word of it earned. But every word of it about Collins.
To be clear: Collins deserved defending. What Trump does to her (trashing her work, grading her face, ordering her to smile) is its own familiar ugliness, and I’m glad people pushed back. But I’m a little saddened by how few people seemed to realize that Mulvaney was being insulted here (repeatedly), too.
Her little musicals
On Sunday evening, Mulvaney posted a four-minute video to TikTok and Instagram. I’m going to give you the whole thing, because it deserves to be read whole.
Hi, is this a good time? Well, it’s definitely an interesting time, because my name is Dylan Mulvaney, and the president of the United States said my name in his speech four times on Friday night. I couldn’t respond right away, because yesterday I had tickets to see Meg Stalter in Oh, Mary!, but now I think I’d like to say a little something.
Firstly, I would like to congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on her award and tell her that I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way. And I hope that she keeps doing all the great work.
Now, the president also brought up a video I did over three years ago. And mind you, I’ve been kind of flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile, just doing my little musicals, singing, dancing, and yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later. And it seems to me that I might be the one that got away for these men. I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.
And when I first heard that the president put me on his diss track, I was like, well, that’s not good. Now, a few weeks ago, I would have probably been more upset about this. But luckily, I was ghosted last month by a hookup who I really liked. And what I realized from that experience was that I shouldn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be with me. So maybe I shouldn’t want to be professionally supported by an administration that doesn’t personally support me, or so many others in this country. Food for thought.
In fact, maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually the greatest compliment of all, because it puts me in the company of some of the most brilliant, empathetic people in our world today.
But I do still wonder: why is it so important to them that I don’t find success? What is it that I have that they don’t? Oh my God, freedom. I am free in a way that they will never have the privilege to experience. And they want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has zero contingency on what they can provide for me, because my freedom is fully dependent on the moment that I acknowledged my real, authentic self, and every day since. And sharing that with the world? It’s just icing on the cake. But they don’t want me to be able to share that, because it would mean young people realizing that if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.
So now I have some action items for us. Are you ready?
Number one: Support trans and nonbinary people. This is the time. I am sounding the alarm. We need you to stand up for us, vote for us, donate to our causes, hire us, and support the businesses who hire us. But most importantly, love us. That is what we need more than anything right now, publicly and proudly.
Number two: If a young person is seeking acceptance, we are going to love them. And if you are a young person watching this, I need you to hold onto every piece of yourself tightly, especially the parts that they are trying to make you feel guilty about, or trying to scare you into abandoning. And I need you to find people who will help you carry those pieces into a kinder day, okay?
Okay. And number three: When they try to judge you for your support of us, take that as the greatest compliment. Ladies, when they tell you that you look like a trans woman, wear it like a medal. Men, when they tell you that being attracted to trans women makes you gay, I want you to Hilary Duff PSA their ass so hard that they don’t even know what just happened. And to the dolls: let’s have each other’s backs.
And lastly, to the president: thank you for reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew. And to quote my favorite recording artist, Shea Diamond: I am America.
Love you.
We’ve now spent a solid decade fighting about cancel culture, about whether anyone should be ruined over an old tweet or a resurfaced college photo. Okay. Run that framework on Dylan Mulvaney and look for the offense. The complete inventory: one sponsored Instagram video promoting a March Madness contest, and a novelty can the company mailed her with her face on it. That’s the whole file. No statement to disavow, no scandal to relitigate, no victim anywhere in it. A beer ad.
And I’ll be honest: I’ve found plenty of Mulvaney’s content reductive over the years. Cringe, even. It could not matter less. Her content has never been the thing on trial. If her posts aren’t for you, the technology for not watching them is free and works great.
So here’s who we’re actually talking about. A musical theater kid who documented her transition online, did one sponsored post for a beer company, and has been screamed at ever since. Nobody has ever said what would end it, because nothing would. The problem is not something she says or does, but who she is. And that’s just bigotry.
Bud Light got to come back, but not Dylan
“I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan any time soon,” said Trump on Friday. This has always been the point. When the boycott was at full boil in 2023, I wrote that its real goal was making companies think twice about hiring a trans person for anything, at any level. Mulvaney said something similar that fall: a company that hires a trans person and then goes quiet “gives customers permission to be as transphobic and hateful as they want.”
The company’s rehabilitation went fine. In October 2023, with the boycott still going, Bud Light became the official beer of the UFC, in what was reported as the biggest sponsorship deal in the promotion’s history. And that deal is how, this June, Bud Light’s logo ended up printed on the Octagon on the White House South Lawn, at the UFC event Trump spent part of Friday’s speech bragging about. (I wrote about that spectacle when it happened.)
The company’s offense was proximity to a trans woman, and proximity can be worked off. You reorganize the marketing department, you sponsor the right fights, you put your logo where the president parties, and all is forgiven. Her offense was being the trans woman. And there’s no working that off.
About all that power we supposedly have
She can’t come back, because she’s needed right where she is. For any of this to look like a fair fight, Dylan Mulvaney has to be enormous.
The whole genre of “super powerful trans people” runs on an imaginary trans person: the one shrieking “did you just assume my gender!?” at strangers, the one demanding you memorize neopronouns. (I’ve been out as trans for fourteen years. I’ve never met a single person who goes by “xir.” I’m sure such people exist, but they are nowhere near common enough for this to be something you spend any amount of time thinking about.) The imaginary trans person is everywhere, powerful, hair-trigger, coming for your kid’s locker room.
Here’s how the people with actual power spent last month. The White House published a press release titled “Supreme Court Bolsters President Trump’s Push to Eliminate Transgender Insanity.” That’s the real name of a real document on whitehouse.gov, posted in the middle of Pride Month, listing the administration’s moves against trans people as a stack of wins. That’s pretty scary, and it goes beyond “reasonable concerns” that people claim to have about sports and youth medicine and whatnot.
Same government that, since the Supreme Court cleared the policy in November, now only issues passports showing your sex assigned at birth. Renew yours, and the letter reverts, no matter what your license, your doctors, your birth certificate, or your entire life says. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent warned that the policy exposes trans people to “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination.”
And the opposition party? Three weeks ago, days after that Supreme Court ruling, Amy Acton, the Democrat running for governor of Ohio, told the Toledo Blade: “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Boys. Her word. She’s got company: Gavin Newsom opened his podcast in 2025 by agreeing with Charlie Kirk about trans athletes. Some Democrats have pushed back; Tim Walz called the party’s retreat a mistake. But with the exception of J.B. Pritzker, the defense almost never comes from anyone who wants to be president, which really worries me about where things are headed.
The butt of the joke
I said at the top that I wanted to sit with this. Here’s where it landed.
The most powerful man alive stood in front of the American press corps and used a cheerful musical theater performer as the worst thing he could think to call a woman. Everyone understood him. The room understood, the headlines understood, the apology demand understood: it is an insult to be compared to a trans woman, as society tends to view us as weird little goblins. The one person who seemed to reject the premise was Mulvaney.
And Mulvaney had to be lovely about it. Again. In 2023 she spent months “scared to leave my house.” Last year she told People she finally felt “a thousand times stronger,” healed, in a good place. Then the president picked at the scab from a podium, and her job was to answer with grace. She did. Everyone spent Monday admiring it. Nobody should need this much of it.
TY for this. The Dims will probably repeat their practice from last time, when they let that atrocious free-surgery-for-prisoners ad float out there without a hint of correction. Not only is that silence morally heinous, but it is also a great way of showing how insincere they are. What monster doesn't care about trans people? Only the actual monsters, as everybody knows.
Don't other people see the constant harassment and intimidation of trans people in the US? Some are blind to how we are treated and others see it and don't remark on it. Thank you Parker for writing it all out so others might get it.
And we need lots of people to get it. Dylan asks people to support trans folk now and she's right to do so. We can't make it without the support of CIS folk. There are so few trans people and we just don't have much power.
Thank you again Parker for your perceptive thought and writing.