CNN‘s Kaitlan Collins was “not surprised” that U.S. President Donald Trump insulted her during his speech at Friday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
During an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Monday, Collins — who serves as CNN’s chief White House correspondent — debriefed the event with Jon Stewart.
“In the room, I was not surprised when he insulted me. That happens pretty regularly inside the Oval Office. This is just a bigger venue where it was happening,” Collins said. “What was most surprising to me was — the room was filled with a lot of his staffers, his cabinet, his allies, Republicans in Congress — it was so quiet in the room during the president’s remarks.”
“Do you think it’s because of how much they respect him?” Stewart asked, to which Collins cheekily replied: “Who’s to say.”
Collins received an award for her coverage of Trump’s contentious meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during the dinner, which was rescheduled from April after a gunman crashed through security at the original event. In his speech, the president said Collins “shouldn’t get the award” and that it was “fake,” and then went on a tangent about how she should smile more. Trump also compared Collins to trans advocate Dylan Mulvaney, mentioning the 2023 Bud Light controversy where conservative customers boycotted the beer brand after Mulvaney posted a social media ad featuring her face on a can.
“I thought Kaitlan had really made it big with a major new sponsorship, but then I informed her that it wasn’t her on the Bud Light can, it was Dylan Mulvaney,” Trump said in his speech. Mulvaney responded to Trump in a TikTok video on Sunday, saying she was “honored” to be compared to Collins and the president’s attack was perhaps the “greatest compliment of all.”
As Collins said, Trump has a history of insulting her and deflecting her questions, which Stewart pointed out are often pretty straightforward. “That’s why I ask the questions the way I do, is because I want anyone to be able to listen to what I’m asking — whether that’s at a briefing or during a moment with the president — and think, you know, I want to know the answer to that, too, or that is a good question,” Collins said. “I don’t want it to only serve one audience or one political leaning, I want anyone — from my family in Alabama, to people in the White House, to people in Washington — to be able to hear that question and think, ‘What is the answer to that?’”
Collins also thanked her CNN colleague Wolf Blitzer, who presented the awards to journalists at the dinner, saying that “he’s called me every day since Friday.” She concluded that despite Trump’s speech, “It’s really not about me and I don’t want it to be about my reaction.”
“I think if you let it become about that, then it becomes a back-and-forth between the two of us,” she said. “And instead, I think it’s more effective to remind people in those moments where he is insulting me or he is criticizing me, about the question I asked or the reporting I did that he was so angry about in this moment — and the fact that I got an award for it really bothered him, clearly.”
Watch Collins’ full interview on “The Daily Show” below.