It’s any TV anchor’s dream come true. Or nightmare. Anyone facing former President Trump live on air the night after he’s been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation but long before he’s prepared to accept the fact is either going to become a legend or crash and burn. In terms of career stakes, there’s none higher in journalism this week. So Kaitlan Collins ought to be feeling a tad jumpy right now.
Collins’s chances are, however, surprisingly hard to call. The idea of anyone working in the media who covered the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency and yet somehow managed to avoid alienating both Democrats and Republicans is clearly preposterous. And yet Collins – in US TV anchor terms, a true unicorn – managed it. But that could may be about to change.
In the latest incredibly complicated move in Trump’s fiendishly tangled relationship with the news network CNN, the former president is taking part in a town hall event on May 10 – an interview hosted by an anchor fielding questions from a studio audience – on the channel he labelled “fake” and whose reporters he routinely chastised.
Collins, CNN’s former White House correspondent who was once barred from a Rose Garden event for asking difficult questions about Vladimir Putin and was later labelled an “activist” by press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, will be fielding the questions. Clearly she won't finish the the event without annoying either or both partisan groups.
But the thing about Kaitlan Collins is, nobody can quite pin down her political beliefs – she's known to ask tough questions of everybody. Her career is, in the words of one former CNN communications chief, “incredibly unlikely, which ought to show you she’s not to be trifled with”.
The Alabama-born 31-year-old describes her upbringing as “apolitical”, remembers her mortgage broker father preferring local news programmes over national and told a magazine she doesn't recall her parents ever voting or expressing strong opinions about any candidates. Her first job, however, was as an entertainment reporter at The Daily Caller, the Right-leaning news website founded by Tucker Carlson – yes, that Tucker Carlson, the recently fired Fox News host described by CNN as a “Right-wing extremist”.
After blogging about Miley Cyrus’s latest tattoos and Shia LaBeouf’s trip to rehab for two years, she was promoted to campaign reporter covering the Trump election in 2016 then White House correspondent a year later. When CNN started asking her on as a talking head, she impressed the then-president, Jeff Zucker and before long became CNN’s White House correspondent.
After her banning, having her questions ignored and her ethics challenged and being attacked on the campaign trail by Trump supporters for wearing a mask during the Covid pandemic she was promoted to chief White House correspondent in 2021 aged just 28 – the youngest to ever hold that post. Then came a co-hosting job on CNN This Morning in November 2022 alongside veteran anchor Poppy Harlow and former prime time host Don Lemon – despised by the right for being black, gay and anti-Trump, loathed by the left for being sexist and accusing black men of being poor role models, fired by CNN in April 2023.
Let’s step back a moment and consider the strangely cosy antagonism at the heart of the US media. The arch liberal baiter Carlson himself, for instance, has hosted shows on PBS, CNN and MSNBC as well as Fox. CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker, who resigned last February over a relationship with a colleague, hired Trump to star in The Apprentice on NBC then oversaw CNN’s position as the anti-Trump network. On his watch, CNN broke the story of the Steele dossier on possible Russian kompromat on the then President-elect and ran many negative stories on Trump’s coterie. What’s unusual about Collins, then, is not that she jumps between conservative and liberal outlets, but that she doesn’t change her reporting style to match said outlets' beliefs.
“What I came to be really impressed by was just how unflappable she was in the briefing room,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told the Washington Post recently. “She’s tenacious and she’s aggressive, and people like talking to her.”
This tenacious approach comes through in the online clip collections of Trump blanking her questions during her White House years. He ignores her, chides her and has aides take her mic away but, to date, has yet to launch into personal attacks online. Indeed, when she was travelling on Air Force One Trump used to seek her out for a bit of a natter.
For her part, she has expressed alarm at the events of January 6 and, in a 2021 interview, said the secret to interviewing Trump was remembering “he wants to intimidate and bully so you don't ask him what he doesn't want to get asked about. You have to remember to focus on the question and get an answer. Being banned by him really prepared me for that.”
Perhaps that’s why, as part of his new “I am not Ron DeSantis” media strategy he has sought her out again. In part, this is because he is furious with Fox News, accusing the organisation of turning against him. In mid-April, the Republican National Committee announced that Fox would host the first presidential candidate debate, prompting Trump to declare that he had not given his approval and would not participate in a forum hosted by “angry, TRUMP & MAGA hating anchors.”
A week later, CNN announced it would host the Trump town hall. Perhaps anticipating the raised eyebrows from the Left, the network’s political directorDavid Chalian explained that CNN approaches “every major presidential candidate and potential candidate about participating in CNN’s coverage – we think it’s important to the process of voters making their choices.”
It's also going to be important for CNN’s languishing ratings. In March, its viewing figures dived a staggering 61 per cent according to Nielsen ratings, placing it’s 473,000 viewers firmly behind MSNBC’s 1.14 million and Fox News’ 2.09 million. CEO Chris Licht, brought in by new parent company Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), to move things centreward after Zucker’s scrappy political leaning, was surprisingly chipper at the time, saying “ratings be damned. Let’s focus on who we are.”
WBD execs point out that most of CNN’s money comes from cable carriage fees, and the CNN brand remains powerful. But with streamers applying pressure to cable subscriptions this isn’t a long term strategy.
Collins’s own show was particularly hard hit, averaging just 359,000 viewers in the first quarter of the year compared with MSNBC’s Morning Joe, which averaged 846,000 total viewers, and Fox News’ Fox & Friends, which boasted an average of 1.21 million viewers. It’s a strife-hit vessel, with the departed Lemon apparently raging at Collins off-air for interrupting him during the show and telling her on-air that viewers were “more interested in the men”.
Right now, viewers are more interested in Collins. Online back and forths suggest viewers think she will be too tough, too weak, too pro-MAGA, too anti-Trump and all shades in between. Given Trump’s on-air hostility to Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who moderated a 2016 debate, she’s got to be expecting him to come out swinging. If she pulls this off, her future is assured. If she doesn’t, she’s in the bucket of anchors who failed to hold the line. No pressure, Kaitlan, but your reputation and your network’s ratings are both in play.
So, in the particularly heightened journey through the looking glass that American politics is currently on, non-partisan Collins and formerly liberal CNN hope for a ratings boost from ex-Republican president Trump who’s choosing to talk to them because he hates conservative news network Fox. Given the event takes place in New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College on Wednesday, they really aren’t in Kansas anymore.
