Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender actress and advocate whom President Donald Trump repeatedly mocked during his speech Friday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, called the insults “the greatest compliment of all” in a video posted Sunday.
“Maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually like the greatest compliment of all, because it puts me in the company of some of like the most brilliant, empathetic people in our world today,” Mulvaney said.
During his speech Friday, which had been rescheduled from April after a man shooting a gun tried to enter the ballroom, Trump raised Mulvaney’s 2023 Bud Light partnership that sparked outrage among conservatives. He compared her to CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, whom he also insulted, in a roast-style joke that was met with silence from the crowd of reporters at the dinner.
“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 after Collins accepted an award from the association for her coverage of the February 2025 Oval Office exchange between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Dylan Mulvaney cost Bud Light $35 billion in market cap. That was the worst commercial ever made by the way, for those few people who want to hear that. Most people don’t care, but I would. I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan any time soon,” Trump said.
In her Instagram response, Mulvaney questioned Trump’s motive for raising the years-old beer can controversy, which he did again Sunday by posting an AI-generated image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body in the advertisement to his social media account.
As part of a promotional campaign tied to the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament in March 2023, Bud Light partnered with Mulvaney, who had a large social media following. The singer and actress then made a sponsored post on Instagram in which she promoted the beer and showed a can with her face on it. The partnership infuriated some conservatives and anti-transgender people, leading to an intense effort on the right to “cancel” Bud Light that included boycotts and social media videos featuring conservatives pouring beer down drains or shooting at the cans with rifles.
“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 like doing my little musicals, singing, dancing, and yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later,” Mulvaney said.
“And it seems to me that I might be like the one that got away for these men. Like I am permanently burned into their retinas, I am microchipped into their minds,” she added.
The transgender advocate called on Americans watching to support transgender and nonbinary people and to view attacks on the community from the Trump administration as a “medal.”
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