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| (Julie Roginsky (Lift Our Voices) |
Donald Trump's featured speech Friday night at the 2026 White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) was supposed to be a homecoming of sorts, marking the return of a president who had skipped the event for 15 years -- since Barack Obama famously roasted him in 2011 and apparently left some bruised feelings in the process. Trump's return, however, proved to be a master class in sexual harassment, according to Julie Roginsky, former Democratic Party strategist; television personality (at Fox News and CNBC); co-founder of the Lift Our Voices nonprofit, which has helped produce landmark civil-rights legislation; and author of the Salty Politics Substack newsletter.
Under the headline "The president sexually harassed female journalists on Friday night. Why won't the press say so?" Roginsky writes:
Donald Trump did not merely “take potshots” at the media at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Friday night. He did not simply deliver an “insult-filled” speech that occasionally “veered off script.” He did not participate in some unusually graceless version of the traditional presidential roast.
The president of the United States stood before a ballroom full of journalists and sexually harassed women whose livelihoods require them to continue showing up at his workplace every day. Their colleagues sat in the room, watched these women get abused, and refused to speak up for them — either by walking out en masse or at least covering this event honestly after the fact.
Roginsky's article includes the following sub-heading: "The #MeToo movement was supposed to teach institutions that harassment flourishes when powerful men can disguise degradation as humor." The WHCD provides evidence, Roginsky argues, that this lesson has not been learned in some (perhaps many) quarters:
When the press describes what happened at the dinner as Trump “mocking” reporters, it launders sex-based workplace degradation into entertainment. It turns harassment into banter, abuse into “barbs,” and female journalists into supporting characters in yet another exhausting story about Trump’s eccentric behavior.
Let’s be very clear about what happened. The president stood on stage and read a speech — presumably written and vetted by his staff — that objectified highly accomplished women, portraying them as nothing more than, at best, a piece of eye candy. The most insulting riffs, about CNN’s Kaitlin Collins, were not ad libbed. Trump read them off a prompter, which means that someone — or likely a group of someones —decided objectifying and demeaning a female reporter (while throwing in a transphobic joke for good measure) was a great way to spend a Friday night.
Minutes earlier, Collins had received a White House Correspondents’ Association award for her coverage of Trump’s Oval Office confrontation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump responded by declaring the award “fake” and saying that Collins did not deserve it.
That was the professional attack. Then came the harassment.
Roginsky reminds us that sexual harassment is "inextricably intertwined" with the workplace. In fact, the work environment seems to provide a kind of rich soil that allows sexual harassment to take root. In the case of a well-known journalist such as Collins (who grew up in my former home state of Alabama, which has the kind of corrupt legal and political environment that provided the backdrop for our early reporting at Legal Schnauzer), the workplace is broader than many of us might realize. In some instances, it appears her workplace is CNN studios and surrounding facilities. But in others, her work site is anyplace that Donald Trump and his associates gather. And that brings us to the point Roginsky drives home:
Trump called Collins a “young, attractive woman” and repeatedly commanded her to smile. “Smile, Kaitlan. Just smile.” he instructed her. (Ladies, how many times have you felt a burning rage when walking down the street and hearing some stranger tell you under his breath as he passed that you would be a lot prettier if you just smiled?)
Trump then compared Collins’ appearance to that of transgender actress Dylan Mulvaney, using both women as the objects of a transphobic joke about Bud Light. (I suppose we are to assume that Trump also finds Mulvaney — Collins’ supposed doppelgänger — “attractive.” Make of that what you will.) In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump doubled down, sharing a photoshopped image of Collins’ face on Mulvaney’s body.
This is not normal political criticism. It has nothing to do with whether Collins’s reporting is fair, accurate, or insightful. This is the most powerful man in the world publicly evaluating a woman’s attractiveness, policing her facial expressions, and using another woman’s gender identity to humiliate her in front of approximately 700 colleagues, competitors, government officials, and media executives.
One observer noted that Trump seems to be "triggered" by Collins. But he doesn't limit his unwelcome critiques to her. For a president who does not favor equal opportunity in many instances, Trump sure can be an equal-opportunity harasser, Roginsky suggests:
Trump did something similar to Jacqui Heinrich, Fox News’s senior White House correspondent and the incoming president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “She can be very tough as a reporter, I will tell you,” he said. “She can be nasty. She looks so beautiful, but she can be so nasty. How could that happen? But she just got married to a very successful congressman, very good congressman. I'd like to have a couple of more votes from it. That's okay. On occasion, he chose a little independence. We don't like that. But now, he's a very professional guy and, he loves our country.”
Think about the message embedded in that statement. Heinrich’s appearance is relevant. Her demeanor is subject to Trump’s judgment. Her professional toughness is “nastiness.” Her marriage is a potential avenue of political influence. In short, her accomplishments are secondary to how attractive Trump finds her and to her status as the wife of a powerful man.
By contrast, when Trump discussed male journalist Josh Dawsey, he called him a “workhorse” and marveled at how many stories he produces. Trump certainly also insulted Dawsey and CNN’s Jake Tapper but only in the context of their work. He did not rate their attractiveness, order them to smile, or define them through their romantic partners.
Technically, Trunp is not a boss to Collins and Heinrich. But in many ways, he controls the environment in which they work. Roginsky knows the landscape and provides details:
The power imbalance could hardly be greater. Collins and Heinrich are not celebrities trading insults with another celebrity. They are journalists assigned to cover the president, who controls the administration they scrutinize, the officials they question, and much of the access they need to perform their jobs. Trump has already excluded the Associated Press from parts of White House coverage and restricted access for other journalists. He has sued news organizations, attacked individual reporters, and repeatedly encouraged a government posture in which access itself becomes punishment or reward. It’s not like he does not have it in him to punish female reporters for their facial expressions or their choice of romantic partner.
Roginsky's main beef seems to be that media executives are not standing up for their female journalists on the ground. She writes:
Where, exactly, are the people who employ these women? Where are CNN chairman and CEO Mark Thompson and Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott? Neither of them is a powerless assignment editor watching helplessly from the cheap seats. They run two of the most prominent news networks in the world.
Thompson did not remain literally silent after Trump’s performance. What he offered is the kind of bloodless corporate statement designed to check a box without offending anyone who matters. “We stand by our journalists and the integrity and fair-mindedness with which the CNN team reports the news,” he said in a statement late Friday. “Honest, accurate journalism may sometimes irritate politicians, but our right to report and present that reporting to the public without government interference is fully protected by the U.S. Constitution.”
Really? The Constitution is not what this is about. Sexual harassment is, which is why it is shocking that Thompson resorted to the First Amendment in critiquing Trump’s speech. Thompson did not name Collins or say that Trump’s remarks were sexist. He did not say that repeatedly ordering a woman to smile and publicly assessing her attractiveness is harassment. He transformed the sexual humiliation of one of his most prominent employees into an abstract disagreement about press freedom.
Collins supplied the moral clarity her own network’s leadership did not. In an Instagram post after the dinner, she shared Eleanor Roosevelt’s observation that “no one can make you feel inferior without your consent” and wrote that the evening’s most important moment was “reminding everyone why the First Amendment — and asking uncomfortable questions that people in power don’t like — matters.” After Trump’s speech, CNN did issue a statement calling Collins “an exceptional, trusted journalist,” praising her “strength and tenacity” and declaring, “We stand by her to the fullest extent.” But the statement never used the words “sexist,” “misogynistic,” or “harassment. It never condemned Trump for ordering a female journalist to smile, publicly evaluating her attractiveness, or using her as the object of a sexist and transphobic joke.
How did Fox News' leadership react to Trump's behavior? It was not exactly a profile in courage, Roginsky writes:
Scott’s cowardice is even more damning. Fox Corporation routinely pats itself on the back for appointing her to serve as CEO of Fox News. The network constantly credits her with mentoring future leaders and bringing “meaningful change” to the network — presumably after the Roger Ailes years, where many women, including me, accused Ailes of sexual misconduct. Yet Scott and Fox have been conspicuously silent about Trump’s objectification of their senior White House correspondent.
Instead, its own recap of the event the next day sanitized Trump’s performance as a night of “jokes” and “razzing,” omitting his most demeaning remarks about Heinrich altogether. Scott did not merely fail to confront the harassment; the organization she runs repackaged it as entertainment. The message to Fox’s female employees could hardly be clearer: When honesty angers Trump or threatens the audience, do not expect the woman in the executive suite to put her own power on the line for you.
If these executives cannot summon the courage to say plainly that the president is subjecting their female employees to gendered harassment, they are not protecting journalism. They are using their women as human shields to preserve corporate access or their own careers or whatever it is that has made them constitutionally unable to call out the sexual harassment before their eyes.
The #MeToo movement was supposed to teach institutions that harassment flourishes when powerful men can disguise degradation as humor and count on everyone around them to protect the relationship rather than the woman. Yet when the harasser is the president and the survivors are members of the press itself, the very people who cover sexual harassment scandals so breathlessly suddenly become passive, bloodless and evasive. They run for their favorite critique of the powerful — that they are attacking the First Amendment — rather than understanding that the First Amendment is a sideshow to this particular scandal.
Trump sexually harassed women journalists from the podium. The corporate press does not lose its objectivity when it says so. It loses its integrity when it refuses to say so.
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