MAGA podcaster Megyn Kelly came out swinging for Donald Trump’s anti-trans joke about CNN star Kaitlan Collins while raging at the poor reception of the president’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner appearance.
The 80-year-old president singled out Collins, 34, during his widely-panned speech at Friday night’s dinner, complaining about her award win and telling her that she should smile.
He then compared Collins to Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender actress despised by MAGA devotees for appearing in Bud Light advertisements, but the attempted joke was met with silence from the crowd and drew widespread backlash.
Kelly, 55, fumed over the negative reaction on her show on Monday, insisting, “It’s funny,” while breaking a cardinal rule of comedy by trying to explain the joke.
“It’s clever because it puts the left in such a difficult position... because they have to say that’s not complimentary. So they have to rip on a trans person, which they definitely don’t want to do,” Kelly told her guest, conservative historian Victor Davis Hanson.
She later repeated her explanation, saying, “It’s like he’s put them in a very difficult position because you—you basically have to say it’s insulting to—to compare her to Dylan Mulvaney.”
The fired NBC News host also tried to rationalize Trump’s swipes at Collins, complaining that the CNN star is “never nice to the president.”
“She’s always nasty. She’s always making negative commentary about him. Her questions always have the most negative bent you could possibly go into the questioning with,” Kelly said, before arguing that Trump simply “did what all presidents do.”
“He got up there, and he gave her a little jazz, which is kind of what they do,” she said.
Kelly chalked up the joke’s failure to the audience of journalists: “I mean, of course, they fell flat in front of this crowd, which is probably why Trump won’t do it again because they’re not in good humor about themselves.”
Hanson chimed in, “No, they only laugh, umm, when somebody that they despise is on the other end of the receiving end.”
Trump doubled down on his broadside against Collins on Sunday, using AI to overlay the anchor’s face on an image of Mulvaney, 29, from a 2023 video in which she promoted Bud Light while donning an Aubrey Hepburn-inspired outfit.
Collins, who has theorized that the president turns to insulting her because he “doesn’t like” her questions, may get the final word after all, appearing on The Daily Show Monday night as a guest of outspoken Trump critic Jon Stewart.
