CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins has dismissed Donald Trump calling her “stupid and nasty”, his latest in a series of attacks on female journalists.
Misspelling Collins’s name, the president wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday: “Caitlin Collin’s [sic] of Fake News CNN, always Stupid and Nasty, asked me why the new Ballroom was costing more money than originally thought one year ago.
“I said because it is going to be double the size, and the quality of finishes and interiors has been brought to the highest level.”
He continued: “FAKE NEWS CNN, and the guy who runs the whole corrupt operation that owns it, is one of the worst in the business. Their ratings are so low that they’re not even counted or relevant anymore. MAGA!!!”
Responding on Instagram, Collins posted a screenshot of Trump’s post with the caption: “Technically my question was about Venezuela.”
Her last on-air interaction with the president came on Friday during the FIFA World Cup draw at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., when she asked him: “You are expected to get the FIFA peace prize. What do you say to people who say that prize might conflict with your pledge to strike Venezuela?”
Trump did not appear especially flustered by the question in the moment, explaining that he did not know for sure that he would win the prize, repeating his claim that he had “settled eight wars” and that his priority was simply “saving lives.”
Among those leaping to Collins’ defense was her network colleague Jake Tapper, who wrote on X that she is “smart,” “nice,” and that any question about the ballooning cost of the president’s East Wing ballroom and its funding was “legitimate.”
The incident is just the latest example of Trump lashing out at female reporters whenever he is confronted with a question he does not care for.
The uptick in rude responses began on November 14 when he told Catherine Lucey, Bloomberg’s White House correspondent, to be “quiet, piggy” on Air Force One when she asked about the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Two days later, he told another Bloomberg reporter in Palm Beach, Florida, who had apparently interrupted him: “Will you let me finish my say? You are the worst. You’re with Bloomberg, right? You are the worst. I don’t know why they even have you.”
When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited the White House on November 18, he berated ABC News’s chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce for being a “terrible person and a terrible reporter” when she asked about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
A week later, on the eve of Thanksgiving, he fumed that veteran New York Times journalist Katie Rogers was “assigned to only write bad things” about him and called her“a third-rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”
On Thanksgiving itself, he called Nancy Cordes of CBS News a “stupid person” when she asked why an Afghan national who had shot two members of the National Guard in D.C. had not been properly vetted by his administration.
Most recently, he claimed Weijia Jiang, also of CBS, would have been “incapable” of passing a cognitive test, again aboard Air Force One, after she dared ask why he had recently had an MRI scan.
Asked about the attacks, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Independent: “President Trump has never been politically correct, never holds back, and in large part, the American people re-elected him for his transparency.
“This has nothing to do with gender – it has everything to do with the fact that the president’s and the public’s trust in the media is at all time lows.”
The president’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, has offered her own opinion on the matter, saying recently on her podcast: “I think it’s a sign that he’s a little rattled.”
