Dylan Mulvaney says Trump’s criticism of her is ‘the greatest compliment of all’

Transgender actress and social media star Dylan Mulvaney found herself back in the spotlight over the weekend, after President Donald Trump mentioned her several times during Friday night’s rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. 

“I couldn’t respond right away because yesterday I had tickets to see Meg Stalter in ‘Oh Mary!,’ but now I think I’d like to say a little something,” she said in a TikTok video on Sunday.

Mulvaney thanked the president for “reminding me that I am more powerful than I even knew,” after he mentioned her by name four times during an hour-long address to the White House press corps in Washington. The dinner, an annual celebration of the First Amendment and the journalists who cover the president, was rescheduled after a gunman opened fire at the original event in April.

Trump referenced Mulvaney after Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, received an award for her coverage of the president and his second administration. He repeated one of his frequent criticisms of Collins, whom he called a “young, attractive woman,” that she “never smiles.”

“Kaitlan, do you ever smile?” he said to a crowd of around 700 at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria on Friday. “Smile. You have a nice position. You’re at CNN Fake News. You should be a happy person. So smile, Kaitlan, just smile.”

The president then compared Collins’ appearance to Mulvaney’s, and brought up a 2023 Bud Light boycott that stemmed from a social media ad Mulvaney posted at the time with her face on a custom beer can. The White House later doubled down on Trump’s comparison with a social media post of Collins’ face superimposed on Mulvaney’s body.

In her response to the president on Sunday, Mulvaney said she was “incredibly honored” to be compared to Collins “in any way,” and congratulated Collins on her award and reporting. She marveled that more than three years after her Bud Light ad stirred right-wing outrage and public backlash, she remains a topic of conversation.

“A few weeks ago, I would have probably been more upset about this,” she said in the video, “but luckily, I was ghosted last month by a hookup who I really liked, and what I realized from that experience was that I shouldn’t want to be with someone who doesn’t really want to be with me, so maybe I shouldn’t want to be professionally supported by an administration that doesn’t personally support me or so many others in this country.”

“In fact, 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,” she added.

The president and his second administration have been openly hostile to transgender Americans, pushing policies and rhetoric that have made it harder for trans people to live openly and safely.

“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,” Mulvaney, who recently made her Broadway debut in “SIX: The Musical,” said in Sunday’s TikTok video. “But what they don’t understand is that my freedom has, like, 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.”