Donald Trump has repeatedly singled out CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for personal attacks to her face, and “The Source” anchor has talked about possible reasons why.
Reflecting on her sometimes-contentious exchanges with the president in an interview she conducted with New York Times White House correspondent Shawn McCreesh for Interview Magazine, published this week, Collins acknowledged how Trump hates being challenged by any journalist.
But his reaction is often different when women reporters are doing the challenging, she suggested.
Read the full interview on Interview Magazine.
“I don’t think the president likes tough questions from anyone, and he’s threatened a lot of our colleagues who are men, like Jonathan Karl and Peter Alexander. But I do think that this term, people have started to notice the difference in his reaction when women like Mary Bruce or Nancy Cordes are doing the questioning,” she said.
Collins pointed to her tense Oval Office exchange with Trump in February, after she questioned him about the victims of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime close associate of the president, the release of whose files the Trump administration had sought to suppress.
“When I asked him about Epstein in the Oval Office, he said, ‘In the 10 years you’ve covered me, I’ve never seen you smile,’” Collins recalled.
“He was surrounded by lawmakers and was showing off all these new hats he had on his desk, and I was thinking about what questions I wanted to ask regarding a sex trafficker who ruined the lives of dozens of women,” she continued.
Collins also suggested that “Trump is very much someone who is one way in front of the cameras and another when he’s off the record.”
She added, “He has always played the media game. He used to impersonate someone and call in and speak positively about himself. I think his base doesn’t always realize he seeks validation from the same mainstream media they all trash.”
