More than three years after sparking conservative backlash with her Bud Light social media partnership, Dylan Mulvaney was as surprised as anyone to hear her name in Donald Trump‘s mouth at the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Counting “four times” the POTUS mentioned her name in his speech on Friday, the Broadway actress, TikTok personality and transgender advocate reacted to being “the one that got away” for MAGA men after Trump attempted to roast her in his hour-long “diss track” at the WHCA’s annual event.
“Firstly, I would like to congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on her award and tell her that I’m incredibly honored to be compared to her in any way, and I hope that she keeps doing all the great work,” prefaced Mulvaney in a TikTok video.
After the WHCA awarded Collins the Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure, Trump joked in his set that he “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,” to which the audience had no reaction.
“And Dylan Mulaney cost Bud Light $35 billion dollar in market cap,” Trump continued as the crowd stayed silent. “That was the worst commercial ever made, by the way, for those few people that want to hear that. Most people don’t care, but I would. I wouldn’t want to hire Dylan anytime soon. Think of it, they hired Dylan Mulaney and their market cap has gone down by $35 billion. Who wrote that commercial?”
Noting the Bud Light video Trump mentioned was more than three years ago, Mulvaney said in her video, “Mind you, I’ve been kind of flying under the radar, keeping up a pretty low profile, just doing my little musicals, singing, dancing, and yet I am still his topic of conversation all these years later. It seems to me that I might be like the one that got away for these men. I am permanently burned into their retinas. I am microchipped into their minds.”
Mulvaney added, “Maybe being publicly mocked and criticized by this administration is actually the greatest compliment of all, because it puts me in the company of some of the most brilliant, empathetic people in our world today. … They want to use their power to take away my freedom. But what they don’t understand is that 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 is the icing on the cake.
“They don’t want me to be able to share that,” she continued. “Because it would mean young people realizing that, if someone like me can be themselves and find success and freedom, then they can find success and freedom for themselves too.”
In April 2023, Bud Light sent a can of their beer with Mulvaney’s face on it to her, which she featured in a TikTok video, prompting intense conservative backlash and a boycott of the brand.
After spectacularly bombing with his WHCD speech, Trump continued to take swipes at his enemies on Truth Social over the weekend with a flood of AI-generated images, including one post featuring Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body in the Bud Light video.
