Note: Apologies in advance to Kaitlan Collins for the headline. It is hyperbolic, it borrows the internet’s adversarial slang, and it leans on the kayfabe logic of a rivalry she has spent months refusing to join. I would bet real money she hates it. It also happens to be accurate, and though she doesn’t need anyone’s help fighting her battles, somebody needs to say it plainly.
The President of the United States spent his weekend abusing a journalist. He mocked her face in front of her peers on Friday night, then woke up Sunday and published a doctored photo of her from the presidential account. Her offense, as best anyone can tell, is competence. Nobody was even surprised, which tells you plenty about where we are.
Friday night was the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where CNN’s Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins accepted an award for her coverage of the tempestuous Zelensky Oval Office meeting. Trump took the stage minutes after (during an event explicitly designed to celebrate press freedom) and called her reporting fake. He told the room he thought Collins had landed a big beer sponsorship before learning the woman on the can was actually Dylan Mulvaney, the transgender influencer at the center of yesteryear’s Bud Light controversy/culture war. Then came the demeaning and nakedly sexist request Trump cannot stop making. “So smile, Kaitlan! Just smile.” The joke died. The Waldorf ballroom went quiet. Trump’s spent enough time in ballrooms to know what that silence meant.
So on Sunday morning he escalated by posting an AI-generated photo depicting Collins as Mulvaney holding a Bud Light, published to the official account of the sitting president. The leader of the free world, commanding a war in Iran and sitting on the Epstein files, found time before Sunday lunch to publish computer-generated revenge art about a reporter who asks him hard questions.
Enough. Feuds require two participants. This is a one-sided campaign of presidential abuse against a single journalist, waged with the resources of the American presidency, and it’s only escalating because Trump keeps failing.
I wrote about these two in February, after Trump blew up an Oval Office press availability rather than answer Collins’ question about redactions in the Epstein files. Collins didn’t lose control that day, which is why he attacked her. He called her “stupid and nasty” on Truth Social in December, said she had “Hatred in her eyes” during a June briefing. Treasonous from the aisle of Air Force One. Now he posts an insulting fake photo on a Sunday morning all because she has the temerity to ask legitimate questions. Or maybe more infuriating to the president is that she declines to flinch when he attacks, which only sends him looking for a bigger rock to throw.
Don’t be confused by who has most of the power in this bizarre relationship. Every time Collins asks an uncomfortable question, Trump drops whatever he wanted to talk about and starts talking about Kaitlan Collins. She can redirect the President of the United States with a follow-up. Her entire response to the weekend was an Instagram post with Wolf Blitzer and an Eleanor Roosevelt quote, which in this matchup qualifies as a haymaker. She has never once raised her voice. He is 80 years old and making memes like a Reddit poster with nuclear codes.
Nobody has ever told Peter Doocy or Ed O’Keefe to smile. No president has wondered aloud whether a male correspondent seems happy enough. The “you should smile more” demand is the oldest and cheapest move insecure men run on women whose competence they can’t answer. In this instance it treats a chief White House correspondent as decoration that has malfunctioned, and it converts her seriousness, the basic requirement of her job, into a character flaw. It is flatly sexist, and everyone in that Waldorf ballroom knew it, which is part of the reason Trump bombed so badly.
None of this makes Collins a victim, and I suspect she’d reject being reduced to helplessness in this dynamic as quickly as she would reject the role of combatant. She is exceptionally good at her job, with the ambition and nerve required to become a chief White House correspondent. She understands what the attacks signify. At best, Trump’s targeting is gross, and at worst it’s dangerous, and it surely wears on her in ways the rest of us never see. But it is also an involuntary certification of her effectiveness. Presidents do not spend their weekends making memes about reporters who ask easy questions.
Her extreme competence and unwavering seriousness carry weight because the press pool around her has effectively been gutted. This White House restructured the briefing room and the press pool to feature more friendly media influencers whose questions arrive pre-approved. But thankfully there are still real reporters in those seats, even if the architecture now works against them.
Maggie Haberman, promoting Regime Change on The Daily Show last month, described a press corps engineered so tough questions and follow-ups die and the president monologues. And when she was asked who still challenges Trump aggressively and professionally, she gave one name. Collins. The most sourced Trump chronicler alive surveyed the entire briefing room and came back with a single reporter. Trump attacks her and waves through the rows of toadies asking about his golf game, because he can tell the difference even if the seating chart no longer does.
Trump’s strategy has always been an economic relationship. He insults someone, the target insults back, the clip becomes a brawl, and the original question, or challenging narrative, suddenly evaporates, replaced by the BONKERS clip.
The political media ecosystem has largely accepted that dynamic for the last decade, some eagerly, some because the incentives of the business left them little choice. Collins has declined it every single time. She keeps a straight face, stays on the question, and shows up again the next morning. Collins not buckling under this pressure means that all he has left is volume, which this weekend meant Trump screaming into a phone about a woman who beat him by staying calm and professional.
Which brings me back to the “Owns” headline. It’s not Collins’ style to claim victory over a president, or any other newsmaker, because keeping score of these exchanges debases her and a profession she happens to practice at its highest level. If Trump had a modicum of her grace, this column would have no subject. Instead he behaves like the very worst of our political media ecosystem, all spectacle and grievance and manufactured beef. She is the best of it, and the gap between the two was on stage at the Waldorf on Friday night for everyone in the room to see.
Collins will presumably be back in the briefing room next week with another question Trump’s White House does not want to address. Trump can flood the zone with demeaning fake photos and real insults. She will keep doing the one thing he has never figured out how to counter: her job.
She is a click seeker like Tapper, not bad, just part of the TV news business model.
Honestly this helped her professionally and who knows she probably signed off on it given that he’s on her speed dial.