Opinion: Kaitlan Collins, Donald Trump and the politics of smiling

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The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is typically a one-week story at most, but this year’s event has spanned two seasons because of the shooting that interrupted the April event and now because of President Donald Trump’s antipathy for Kaitlan Collins.

Collins, the White House correspondent for CNN, was a target of one of Trump’s least effective jokes during the rescheduled event, and has since become a cause célèbre in the media because of her stoic responses to the president’s jabs and one thing in particular that he said Friday.

“She never smiles. Do you ever smile?” Trump said, looking toward Collins.

It’s unclear if the president knew that he was asking a prickly question that comes front-loaded with gender-related tension. But he should have known. Just ask MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough, who got in trouble in 2016 for telling then-candidate Hillary Clinton that she should smile more during a speech. Or anyone else who has made this recommendation in the public square.

Attempts to explain why so many women find the request offensive usually center on sexism: the idea that men are telling women how they should look or behave. But Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders has said Nancy Pelosi should smile more, and there is a whole lot of ongoing conversation about why New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani smiles so much.

In an essay for The Guardian entitled “I spent a month trying to smile like Zohran Mamdani — it’s no easy feat,” Arwa Mahdawi wrote, “I can’t say with certainty why Mamdani grins all the time but I suspect the reasons aren’t particularly uplifting. The thing is, not everyone is allowed to be angry. When you’re brown or black and growing up somewhere where you are a minority, you soon learn that your emotions are constantly policed.”

The “emotion police” sounds downright Orwellian, and telling a woman she ought to smile more seems to fall short of harassment, as some claim. It’s an oafish comment to be sure, even worse when expanded to “You’d be prettier if you’d smile,” which I and countless other women have been subjected to by complete strangers.

Still, there are worse things to say to a person, and there were, in fact, worse things said at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. (You can read Trump’s full speech here, courtesy of RealClearPolitics.) In her assessment of the evening, Sasha Stone wrote, “It was either hilariously funny or extremely offensive, depending on your tribal affiliation.”

But the room was mostly silent when Trump took on Collins, a 34-year-old Alabama native who once worked for The Daily Caller, the right-leaning website co-founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. (Carlson sold his stake in 2020.)

Trump’s beef with Collins has nothing to do with his beef with Carlson, however. The president has been calling out Collins for years, so much so that three years ago Politico published a piece entitled “‘Don’t talk to me’: A look at Trump’s previous clashes with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.”

This clash, however, comes at a time when there is a real chance that CNN could come under the ownership of Paramount Skydance and CBS boss Bari Weiss. It also bestowed upon Collins the kind of celebrity that made her a plum “get” on late-night shows.

On “The Daily Show,” she smiled … a lot.

But you do have to wonder why she went on “The Daily Show” to have a friendly conversation with Jon Stewart, no fan of the president, especially since she told Stewart, “It’s really not about me, and I don’t want it to be about my reaction.”

You also have to wonder why Trump agreed to speak at all, given his disdain for the audience, and the potential for things not going well, which is the general consensus of what happened. (“He bombed,” former Trump aide Alyssa Farah Griffin said.)

Perhaps the moral here is that not every invitation has to be accepted. There’s a lot to be said for a quiet evening at home with the family, just sayin’.

When poets attempt satire

Over the past few years, Joseph Massey has been called the poet laureate of the right. This happened, in part, because of attention he got after being on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, and because in some conservative circles, he was held up as an example of a person who got unfairly canceled because of a messy relationship gone bad. (He told a writer for The Free Press last year, “it was at the frenzied peak of #MeToo, and the poetry world hadn’t had a scalp yet.”)

Now enjoying a professional renaissance with a book of poems about America, Massey posts on social media regularly, often about his photogenic cat. But this week, amid increasing chatter about the journal of former federal health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, Massey departed from his usual fare to share what he said was an “unbelievable” excerpt from Fauci’s journal.

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The “unbelievable” part should have been a clue.

If not, the outlandish entries should have been. They included “I can’t leave my house because my neighbors chant my name and disturb the wildlife” and “Off now to be interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, who I had dinner with yesterday. Delicious mozzarella sticks — no masks, but hot dairy dilutes the germ plume.”

There were also some off-color remarks that, to me, made it clear that Massey was making fun of the real journal entries released by Sen. Rand Paul in advance of Fauci’s testimony under subpoena this week.

But not everyone made the distinction. Massey’s post was shared more than a thousand times on X, with many people believing it was real, prompting the platform to display a “community note” that said, “This entry does not appear in Anthony Fauci’s diary entries released by Sen. Rand Paul. No March 14, 2021 entry exists in the documents.”

Massey also had to wade into the comments to assure people that he had written the post and that it was satirical. There is danger in stepping outside one’s genre.

Recommended Reading

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the longstanding “Dead Donor Rule” with regard to organ donation bears revisiting in a time when people in some countries are allowed to choose medically assisted death. Valerie Hudson sees the “logical” end to this thinking as abhorrent.

“One might be excused for thinking there is no way to make the Canadian euthanasia situation worse than it already is, but you’d be wrong,” she writes.

Read more here: How Canada’s MAiD laws could become even worse

The Wall Street Journal recently asked whether talk therapy is leading to rising numbers of young people cutting ties with their parents. Naomi Schaefer Riley has another theory.

“The estrangement crisis is largely confined to America’s ‘haves.’ (They are people who can afford therapy in the first place.) These are the young adults most likely to have been overparented at every step,” she writes.

The ever-changing definition of adulthood and its costs

“Trump Accounts” may sound much like “Trump watches” or “Trump phones” but don’t let the name scare you off, writes David Blankenhorn.

“In his will, Benjamin Franklin, arguably our greatest American, created a revolving loan program in which young artisans of good character could borrow money at low interest to establish themselves in a trade, on the condition that the repaid loans would in turn be used to help more young artisans. This was more than income support. It was seed money coupled with responsibility intended to perpetuate itself across generations.”

Don’t dismiss ‘Trump Accounts’ just because of the name

End Notes

In last week’s Right to the Point poll, we considered whether MAGA would still be a force when Donald Trump leaves office. Only a quarter of us said yes.

Finally, it didn’t take long for the Cyclospora outbreak to become political and to be dubbed “Lettucegate,” with a slow federal response being blamed on the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s possible to raise your eyebrows at that, and also at Trump’s vow to punish Mexico with tariffs because of contaminated lettuce.

Meanwhile, Peter Doocy’s question to Trump — when is it safe to eat lettuce again? — goes unanswered, and we’re not taking any chances in my household. As my friend Gary Karr quipped, “We have gone from ‘Let us pray’ to ‘Lettuce? Pray.’”

On a more positive note, lettuce-phobia has given rise to a question I’d never considered until now: whether a “real” Greek salad contains lettuce or not.

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The consensus seems to be no — news you can use in the time of Lettucegate.