For an hour and four minutes on Friday night, the president stood at a podium in a hotel he used to own and used the White House press corps as a prop. The irony of staging a White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the presence of a man actively working to dismantle the First Amendment protections of the very press he was ostensibly there to honor is almost too thick. To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump used the event as a campaign rally and personal vendetta, targeting CNN’s chief White House correspondent and anchor Kaitlan Collins with misogynistic, transphobic “jokes,” and capping the night with a “Trump 2028” hat — an authoritarian flourish masquerading as humor. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had won the WHCA’s Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure for her reporting on the tense February 2025 Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When Stewart pressed her on the president’s fixation, Collins defended her record, emphasizing that she refuses to serve only one political audience.