Kaitlan Collins Is CNN’s “Joyful Warrior” Covering Trump 2.0

Around 15 minutes to airtime, Kaitlan Collins got some breaking news out of the White House. Donald Trump’s team was seeking to clarify his remarks earlier that day regarding an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members, the subject of yet another court fight early in his presidency.

Collins, wearing a vibrant fuchsia suit and pointed-toe nude pumps, read the White House statement aloud at CNN’s Hudson Yards studios, indicating to her production team to quickly integrate it into the top of that evening’s show. CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig, who was seated at a nearby table, preparing to offer his thoughts on the developments for viewers, quipped that the Trump administration’s actions were “straight out of Veep.” Moments later, the crew was counting down, and Collins was on air, opening her 9 p.m. show with her signature line “straight from the source tonight” and the news that Trump was claiming he “didn’t sign what might be his most controversial order yet.”

Such is life in a Trump news cycle, which Collins, 33, has been steeped in now for nearly a decade. After covering Trump’s 2016 campaign and his early days at the White House for the conservative Daily Caller, Collins decamped to CNN and emerged as one of cable network’s standout correspondents during the first term. Collins, just a few years out of the University of Alabama, showed remarkable composure in challenging Trump during those years and dealing with his “fake news” retorts. Jeff Zucker, the former CNN CEO who hired Collins, suggests she may be “the last great star that cable news produces.”

As the TV news industry contracts, and bloated salaries for star anchors are looking like a thing of the past, Collins’s multiplatform prowess—breaking news online, doing live hits throughout the day, anchoring at night, and sharing vertical videos outside the White House on Instagram—certainly looks like a model for a next-generation cable news star. Collins, who moved to New York to cohost the short-lived CNN This Morning, has lately been anchoring The Source from Washington DC in order to perform her duties as a prime-time anchor and as CNN’s recently named chief White House correspondent.

It’s in the latter role that she’s continued enduring Trump’s wrath, like when she interjected in a February press conference to ask if he trusts Russian president Vladimir Putin. “Nobody watches CNN anymore. Because they have no credibility,” he shot back. As Collins tells me, “Trump’s response was to criticize me and then criticize CNN, even though it was a totally legitimate question,” she says, “which I think is a distraction technique.” More recently, Trump snapped at Collins as she pressed him on Signalgate: “Excuse me, I didn’t pick you.”

Despite public clashes with the 45th and 47th president—or, partly, because of them?—CNN executives have kept Collins front-and-center in the Trump era. Chris Licht, who briefly succeeded Zucker, assigned Collins to moderate an infamous Trump town hall in 2023, while current chief Mark Thompson has tasked her with covering the second term. “Kaitlan is not just a brilliant prime-time anchor but one of our very best reporters—fair, well-sourced, and not afraid to stand up to anybody,” Thompson says.

Collins recalls the CNN boss telling her that she’d be returning to the White House after the November election.

“I was like, ‘Oh, for 100 days or something?’” Collins had asked.

“No,” Thompson replied. “Four years.”

I met Collins on an absurdly windy day in March for lunch at Locanda Verde, steps away from CNN’s Hudson Yards headquarters. Walking into the restaurant, I looked as though I just went skydiving. When Collins appeared, however—in a chic denim set, paired with a sage green Bottega Veneta woven leather bag—not a single strand of hair was out of place from her signature shiny blowout, which was tucked behind slim tortoise shell Celine sunglasses perched on top of her head. Not only that, but she told me that before she flew in from DC that morning, she had already worked out.

Collins acknowledges her “crazy” schedule, which includes typically boarding a 9 a.m. train for Washington on Monday in the event of an afternoon White House daily briefing. “I like to just be there because even if there’s nothing on the schedule, something will inevitably happen,” Collins says, adding that “the worst thing that would happen is me not being there.” She spends weekdays reporting from the White House, before heading in the evening to CNN’s Washington bureau to anchor The Source. “When I’m leaving the White House, I have this head fake where I feel like I’m leaving work, like I’m done, and then I’m like, wait, I’m going to my other job,” she says.

Then there are the really exhausting days. Collins recalls one Friday in February when she flew back to New York in the morning, before the White House announced a press conference later that day with Japanese prime minister Shigeru Ishiba. So Collins flew back to Washington for the 2 p.m. presser, during which she asked Trump whether he planned to fire FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases, and then flew to New York to tape The Source.

When I ask about fears of burnout, Collins explains that her passion for her work overrides the exhaustion. “The more you do, the more energy you have,” she tells me. “Her work ethic is second to none,” Zucker says. “She is incredibly committed to her work and her profession. That’s why this idea of her anchoring a daily show and also being the chief White House correspondent shouldn’t phase anyone. That’s just par for the course for Kaitlan.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who Collins considers her “buddy” and a “huge mentor,” also had high praise for the young chief White House correspondent, a role he once occupied himself, telling me that the job “is one of unique history and responsibility—which can be overwhelming, but I never worried about that with Kaitlan. She’s relentless, in the best possible way.” Collins describes herself as a “joyful warrior,” who is willing to follow the news wherever it takes her, whether that be the White House, Israel, Ukraine, or anywhere there is a story to cover. “I go where they tell me,” she says.

For all the president’s grumbling about Collins’s questions and the supposed bias of the network she’s now affiliated with, her path to covering the White House notably began on the right, under the guidance of one of the president’s most influential media boosters. “If I hadn’t worked at the Daily Caller, I don’t know if I’d be covering Trump,” says Collins, who credits her former boss, Daily Caller cofounder Tucker Carlson, with encouraging her to report on the 2016 election.

Working at the Daily Caller, she says, “was helpful to me in covering Trump because it was all these Trump-ish people, people who went on to become huge Trump supporters, including Tucker, and I worked with him every day.” She continues, “I have never been like, opinionated or ideological, but I could see the shifting on the right of, being like, they didn’t love Trump either, and then totally embraced him when they realized that he was gonna be the nominee.”

It was in April 2017 that Collins’s CNN career began to come into focus. She recalls attending the network’s brunch the morning after the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a Sunday soiree populated by hungover journalists. But Collins had turned in early due to a TV appearance that morning and arrived at brunch “fresh as a daisy,” as she puts it. Colllins recalls chatting with media reporter Oliver Darcy, who had recently joined CNN, when she spotted Zucker and introduced herself.

But Collins had already made an impression on Zucker, who tells me he noticed her work for the Daily Caller. “She was very young, and she was very impressive within the White House press briefing room and at press conferences,” he says. “She showed an extraordinary amount of poise for someone so young.” Later, at brunch, Zucker introduced Collins to Virginia Moseley, CNN’s executive editor, which “jump-started my interview process,” she says, and an offer followed soon after.

Collins also impressed her colleagues in the briefing room and was elected to serve as president of the White House Correspondents Association for the 2024–25 term. She relinquished the post when landing the New York–based morning show job, though she is, of course, concerned about rifts between the president and the press corps. The WHCA, which will hold its annual dinner later this month, is in a beleaguered state, with the White House taking over one of its key roles (running the daily press pool) and reportedly planning to grab another (briefing room seating). The White House has also banned the Associated Press for sticking with “Gulf of Mexico,” a move Collins describes as “obviously retaliatory in nature” and likens the experience to her getting barred from covering a Rose Garden event in 2018. “It’s like what they tried to do to me,” she says. At the time, Collins recalls members of the WHCA having her back, singling out Fox News’s Bret Baier for his support. “It meant a lot,” she says.

She rejects the idea that the current WHCA is “leaving people out” and notes that the Daily Caller, which was critical of Barack Obama, joined the group during his presidency. “I’m all for more people coming in,” she says, adding, “But when you start taking people away, or removing people or banning them, that is where it’s dangerous territory. That’s kind of the moment we’re at now.” Collins praises MSNBC’s Eugene Daniels, the current WHCA president, as having done a “good job” in a “tough moment to navigate,” adding that he’s “negotiating with [the White House] while covering them.”

As we spoke over multiple cups of coffee, Collins seemed somewhat uncomfortable with being on the other side of an interview and having to talk so much about herself, repeatedly giving credit to her team and others for her success. Though she casually mentioned texting with Charles Barkley, playfully taunting the famed Auburn alumni about March Madness, she can also seem blissfully unaware that appearing daily on television has given her celebrity status. Look no further than the Daily Mail, which, in addition to publishing dozens of stories about things Collins has said on CNN, or what others in media and politics have said about her, has also covered her dating life.

Still, Collins appeared shocked and touched when a fan, who identified himself as a former journalist from Panama, came over to the table to introduce himself and ask her for a photo. “I have to say that I admire you so much,” he told her. Collins was gracious in her response and seemed genuinely interested in the man’s story. (CNN assured me the moment wasn’t a setup!)

Collins isn’t the only young star on the network: 36-year-old Abby Phillip hosts CNN NewsNight at 10 p.m. hour. And other CNN correspondents have rankled Trump—most notably, now former correspondent Jim Acosta. But Collins’s role in this new Trump era, encompassing dayside White House reporting and nightly hosting duties, appears distinct. She is also serving as a moderator for major political events, including Thursday night’s battleground-states town hall alongside Jake Tapper.

Recently, alongside all her other responsibilities, you might see Collins sharing her reporting from the White House in cell-phone videos promoted by CNN’s social media profiles. The initiative excites her, saying Thompson is “leading CNN through a really crazy time and a difficult time, but also an important one.” The digital strategies that Thompson is “implementing and incorporating are so smart because it’s how we get our news these days,” Collins says. As Thompson tells me, “Kaitlan is a digital native who is as accomplished joining a live chat or updating the audience on vertical video as she is occupying the chair at 9 o’clock.”

After lunch, Collins races over to CNN’s offices to meet with her New York–based production team for the first time in three weeks, given that she’s been spending much of Trump’s first months in office in DC. The pace may have taken a toll on her team, as her executive producer, Kristin Donnelly, abruptly resigned from the role in February. When I ask about the departure, Collins’s response reflected the amount of work expected of not only her job, but of those behind the camera, saying, “There are no days off. You can’t have a chill Friday. If you ever think it’s going to be chill, it’s guaranteed to not be.”

On any given night, Collins is tackling the latest revelations out of the White House and their reverberations on Wall Street or around the globe. She’s managed to book guests of varying political views, whether that’s independent senator Bernie Sanders or Republican senator Markwayne Mullin, as well as people from inside the Trump administration, including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. Sometimes the show can get “heated, but it’s always substantive and informative,” Collins said. “No one gets to come on and just do talking points.”

She recalls an interview with Lutnick that went “off the rails on vaccines” before the election. “There’s a moment in the interview where I was like, ‘Okay, I did not think that we were going here,’” Collins says, adding, “You can’t just go back to having a normal conversation after that because the viewers would be like WTF?” On challenging Lutnick, Collins tells me, “You have to follow where the news goes, but also balance it by keeping it on track and not letting them dictate where it goes.”

Occasionally, newsmakers push back against the anchor on the basis of their perceived issues with the mainstream media or CNN specifically. When I ask whether it bothers her, Collins says: “Let them. If they do that, or if they say, well this is not what this interview is supposed to be about, then I already know that I’ve won because they’re deflecting. They don’t know how to answer the question because if you have an answer, you’d give it.”

And when the criticism is coming from the president, she says, “My feeling is to not take it personally because if you respond to that, then it’s getting away from the point of the question we’re asking, which is way more important than a conflict with the president of the United States.”