Donald Trump did not merely “take potshots” at the media at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday night. He did not simply deliver an “insult-filled” speech that occasionally “veered off script.” He did not participate in some unusually graceless version of the traditional presidential roast.
The president of the United States stood before a ballroom full of journalists and sexually harassed women whose livelihoods require them to continue showing up at his workplace every day. Their colleagues sat in the room, watched these women get abused, and refused to speak up for them — either by walking out en masse or at least covering this event honestly after the fact.
When the press describes what happened at the dinner as Trump “mocking” reporters, it launders sex-based workplace degradation into entertainment. It turns harassment into banter, abuse into “barbs,” and female journalists into supporting characters in yet another exhausting story about Trump’s eccentric behavior.
Let’s be very clear about what happened. The president stood on stage and read a speech — presumably written and vetted by his staff — that objectified highly accomplished women, portraying them as nothing more than, at best, a piece of eye candy. The most insulting riffs, about CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, were not ad libbed. He read them off a prompter, which means that someone — or likely a group of someones —decided objectifying and demeaning a female reporter (while throwing in a transphobic joke for good measure) was a great way to spend a Friday night.
Minutes earlier, Collins had received a White House Correspondents’ Association award for her coverage of Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump responded by declaring the award “fake” and saying that Collins did not deserve it.
That was the professional attack. Then came the harassment.
Trump called Collins a “young, attractive woman” and repeatedly commanded her to smile. “Smile, Kaitlan. Just smile.” he instructed her. (Ladies, how many times have you felt a burning rage when walking down the street and hearing some stranger tell you under his breath as he passed you by that you would be a lot prettier if you just smiled?)
Trump then compared Collins’ appearance to that of transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney, using both women as the objects of a transphobic joke about Bud Light. (I suppose we are to assume that Trump also finds Mulvaney — Collins’ supposed doppelgänger — “attractive.” Make of that what you will.) In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump doubled down, sharing a photoshopped image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body.
This is not normal political criticism. It has nothing to do with whether Collins’s reporting is fair, accurate, or insightful. This is the most powerful man in the world publicly evaluating a woman’s attractiveness, policing her facial expressions, and using another woman’s gender identity to humiliate her in front of approximately 700 colleagues, competitors, government officials, and media executives.
Trump did something similar to Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News’s senior White House correspondent and the incoming president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “She can be very tough as a reporter, I will tell you,” he said. “She can be nasty. She looks so beautiful, but she can be so nasty. How could that happen? But she just got married to a very successful congressman, very good congressman. I'd like to have a couple of more votes from it. That's okay. On occasion, he chose a little independence. We don't like that. But now, he's a very professional guy and he's a very, he loves our country.”
Think about the message embedded in that statement. Heinrich’s appearance is relevant. Her demeanor is subject to Trump’s judgment. Her professional toughness is “nastiness.” Her marriage is a potential avenue of political influence. In short, her accomplishments are secondary to how attractive Trump finds her and to her status as the wife of a powerful man.
By contrast, when Trump discussed male journalist Josh Dawsey, he called him a “workhorse” and marveled at how many stories he produces. Trump certainly also insulted Dawsey and CNN’s Jake Tapper but only in the context of Dawsey’s and Tapper’s work. He did not rate their attractiveness, order them to smile, or define them through their romantic partners.
This was not an isolated episode. In November, Trump snapped “Quiet, piggy”at Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey, after she questioned him about the Epstein files. In February, Trump berated Collins in the Oval Office after another Epstein question and again complained that she did not smile. Collins later observed that many women recognized the experience immediately: a man dismissing a woman’s substantive work and demanding that she arrange her face more pleasantly for him.
In June, he returned to the subject, telling Collins that she had “hatred in her eyes” because he never saw her smile. Friday night was simply an escalation of a fixation that Trump had already displayed repeatedly in the workplace where Collins covers him.
The power imbalance could hardly be greater. Collins and Heinrich are not celebrities trading insults with another celebrity. They are journalists assigned to cover the president, who controls the administration they scrutinize, the officials they question, and much of the access they need to perform their jobs. Trump has already excluded the Associated Press from parts of White House coverage and restricted access for other journalists. He has sued news organizations, attacked individual reporters, and repeatedly encouraged a government posture in which access itself becomes punishment or reward. It’s not like he has does not have it in him to punish female reporters for their facial expressions or their choice of romantic partner.
Where, exactly, are the people who employ these women? Where are CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott? Neither of them is a powerless assignment editor watching helplessly from the cheap seats. They run two of the most prominent cable news networks in the world. Calling this behavior out is the most basic obligation of their jobs.
Thompson did not remain literally silent after Trump’s performance. What he offered is the kind of bloodless corporate statement designed to check a box without offending anyone who matters. “We stand by our journalists and the integrity and fair-mindedness with which the CNN team reports the news,” he said in a statement late Friday. “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.”
Really? The Constitution is not what this is about. Sexual harassment is, which is why it is shocking that Thompson resorted to the First Amendment in critiquing Trump’s speech. Thompson did not name Collins or say that Trump’s remarks were sexist. He did not say that repeatedly ordering a woman to smile and publicly assessing her attractiveness is harassment. He transformed the sexual humiliation of one of his most prominent employees into an abstract disagreement about press freedom.
Collins supplied the moral clarity her own network’s leadership did not. In an Instagram post after the dinner, she shared Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent” and wrote that the evening’s most important moment was “reminding everyone why the First Amendment — and asking uncomfortable questions that people in power don’t like — matters.” After Trump’s speech, CNN did issue a statement calling Collins “an exceptional, trusted journalist,” praising her “strength and tenacity” and declaring, “We stand by her to the fullest extent.” But the statement never used the words “sexist,” “misogynistic,” or “harassment. It never condemned Trump for ordering a female journalist to smile, publicly evaluating her attractiveness, or using her as the object of a sexist and transphobic joke.
Scott’s cowardice is even more damning. Fox Corporation routinely pats itself on the back for appointing her to serve as CEO of Fox News. The network constantly credits her with mentoring future leaders and bringing “meaningful change” to the network — presumably after the Roger Ailes years, where many women, including me, accused Ailes of sexual misconduct. Yet Scott and Fox have been conspicuously silent about Trump’s objectification of their senior White House correspondent.
Instead, its own recap of the event the next day sanitized Trump’s performance as a night of “jokes” and “razzing,” omitting his most demeaning remarks about Heinrich altogether. Scott did not merely fail to confront the harassment; the organization she runs repackaged it as entertainment. The message to Fox’s female employees could hardly be clearer: when honesty angers Trump or threatens the audience, do not expect the woman in the executive suite to put her own power on the line for you.
If these executives cannot summon the courage to say plainly that the president is subjecting their female employees to gendered harassment, they are not protecting journalism. They are using their women as human shields to preserve corporate access or their own careers or whatever it is that has made them constitutionally unable to call out the sexual harassment before their eyes.
What would CNN do if a corporate executive repeatedly told Collins to smile, publicly discussed how attractive he found her, and compared her appearance to another woman’s as a form of humiliation? What would Fox News do if a powerful executive demeaned Heinrich by discussing her looks, demeanor, and romantic relationship? (On second thought, I know the answer to that question.)
Would human resources call it “a personal jab”? Would management send the employee back into the man’s office Monday morning without publicly identifying what had occurred?
The #MeToo movement was supposed to teach institutions that harassment flourishes when powerful men can disguise degradation as humor and count on everyone around them to protect the relationship rather than the woman. Yet when the harasser is the president and the survivors are members of the press itself, the very people who cover sexual harassment scandals so breathlessly suddenly become passive, bloodless and evasive. They run for their favorite critique of the powerful — that they are attacking the First Amendment — rather than understanding that the First Amendment is a sideshow to this particular scandal.
Trump sexually harassed women journalists from the podium. The corporate press does not lose its objectivity when it says so. It loses its integrity when it refuses.
Omigod, Julie, you said it all! You really shined a very bright light on an ugly, dark corner of this country. I blame this country for electing this soulless blob of misogynistic bile. He is the worst offender, no doubt, with musk a close second. You named exactly what happened at the WHCD and the cowards who couldn’t stand up. But of course. So many elites have sold their souls for money.
He’s an adjudicated rapist