Dylan Mulvaney had the perfect response to Trump’s press gala joke

In a TikTok video shared Sunday evening, actor and influencer Dylan Mulvaney addressed the fact that the Friday before, President Donald Trump mentioned her name a total of four times at his awkward and meandering White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech. In his address, the president mocked the appearance of CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins, who won an award for her coverage of the administration earlier that evening. Trump called Collins’ award “fake,” saying he thought she should not have won it, before comparing Collins’ appearance to Mulvaney’s in reference to a short form video Mulvaney filmed for Bud Light in 2023. 

“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,” Trump said in his speech. “Dylan Mulvaney cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap.”

In her video, Mulvaney asked herself why the right, a good three years later, is still thinking about her and her infamous Bud Light ad video, which sparked vicious backlash and a boycott from conservative celebrities and politicians who were outraged that the company partnered with a transgender woman for an ad.

“It seems to me that I might be the one that got away for these men, like I am permanently burned into their retinas, I am microchipped into their minds,” Mulvaney mused.

Her video reflected a confounding reality I often find myself thinking about: Why is the right so adamantly fixated on us trans folks, who make up less than 1% of the country’s population and just want to live our lives in peace?

Now that I’m off X (formerly Twitter), it’s been a minute since I’ve gone viral amongst the right wing and gender-critical spaces of the internet. But sometimes I still stumble across vitriol directed at me. It’s an odd feeling. I exist in my everyday life as a woman. My body, despite my height and weight, is woman shaped, thanks to my hormones. If I didn’t make a living writing about trans politics, I wouldn’t really have to deal with this type of internet transphobia, which I almost exclusively deal with online.

All of us trans people are just doing our own thing. Doing our jobs, getting groceries, trying to find pleasures when and where they present. Outside one little mistake at our birth, we are just like everyone else. Yet we haunt the thoughts of right wingers who simply cannot accept that we exist. We are a thing to be ostracized, something for the president to mock his enemies with. Our existence seems to push conservatives into existential crisis.

Conservatives look at us and feel angry, but for most of us trans people in real life, we don’t think about them at all unless they are taking away our civil rights.

Trump’s use of Mulvaney as an attack vector is yet another example of the right being utterly obsessed with trans people. 

There’s a common misconception that these right wing attacks on trans people and trans rights is a proportional response to liberal overreach — but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Social conservatives chose trans rights as the next battleground after losing on gay marriage with the Obergefell Supreme Court decision in 2015. Since then, the right has lurched from one trans outrage to another. First it was the failed bathroom ban in North Carolina, then the trans military ban, then the trans athlete bans, then the bans on any school-aged books mentioning that trans people exist, then the trans youth care bans — and now we have the Trump administration literally purging every mention of the word “transgender” from government websites.

Mulvaney is right — the best proof that trans people do in fact  exist is that we continue to live rent free in Trump’s mind. He rarely lets a public speaking opportunity go by without taking an incoherent swipe at our existence. 

Earlier in the week, Trump gave a speech in which he said “men in women’s sports came ravaging through our cities.” Over the weekend, after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he gave another speech in which he again referenced “men in women’s sports,” the usual crude and inaccurate reference to trans athletes, who have largely been banned across the country at most levels of play outside of some school level sports in a few blue states.

Despite triumphing over nearly everything and everyone they’ve attacked on trans issues, conservatives are still obsessed. Even when centrist Democrats are running away from the trans rights platform seemingly as fast as they can. Republicans keep attacking. 

Mulvaney perfectly nailed why this is in her TikTok video.

“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,” she said. “But what they don’t understand is 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.”

Mulvaney’s response to Trump’s clumsy bigotry was flawless. She said she was flattered to be compared to Collins and encouraged her to continue doing her job as a reporter. 

While I know that Trump fully meant the comparison between the two women to be an insult toward Collins, I have longed for the day when society reacts to a comparison between the appearance of a trans woman and a cis woman as something other than insulting. Mulvaney gave us a glimpse of what that could feel like, even if it was just for a few minutes. 

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