In the packed White House briefing room CNN’s chief White House correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, takes her place in the front row.
Dressed in a sleek grey suit, legs crossed, the 32-year-old steels herself before firing a volley of questions at Donald Trump’s press secretary amid the Signalgate furore enveloping the administration.
Visibly irritated, Karoline Leavitt allows Collins just one question before shutting her down.
“Kaitlan, I’m not taking your follow-up,” Mrs Leavitt insists.
“I have a follow-up on something you just said though, Karoline,” Collins fires back, thrusting her pen into the air in exasperation.
Mrs Leavitt refuses to yield.
Credit: The White House
This type of confrontation has become cinema for Republicans hungry to see Collins – and other members of the mainstream media – fail.
Just days before, the pair clashed over claims that presidential pardons ordered by Joe Biden were signed using a robotic pen, rendering them void, something Collins was skeptical about.
Instead of answering Collins’s question, Mrs Leavitt replied with a wry smile: “You’re a reporter, you should find out.”
Credit: The White House
Mr Trump has declared war on “legacy media” journalists like Collins, accusing them of spreading “fake news”.
“I believe that CNN and MSNBC, who literally write 97.6 per cent bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party, and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” he said last month, in a speech at the justice department.
Each uncomfortable exchange between Collins and the 27-year-old press secretary will be seen as a win for the administration.
“They think insulting people, demeaning them is the quickest way to discredit,” a former cabinet official during the first Trump administration told The Telegraph.
Collins, however, insists it is simply her job “to ask questions and get answers”.
“..this has always been my mantra, kind of since round one, it’s not about me. If you let them make it about you, I think you’re losing,” she told the New Yorker.
Donald Trump has declared war on ‘legacy media’ journalists like Collins – Al Drago/Bloomberg
Like most American journalists, Collins’s perfectly blow-dried hair and sparkling white teeth are just as much a part of her brand as her forensic examination skills and on-screen confidence.
Collins, now 32, was the youngest-ever reporter to bag the top White House role at the network when she first landed the job aged 28.
Before becoming a household name as a CNN anchor, Collins worked in Washington as a correspondent for The Daily Caller, a conservative news site founded by Tucker Carlson, fresh from her studies at the University of Alabama.
Collins was born and raised in the state, to apolitical parents who taught her that the American political system was a “failed one,” according to InStyle magazine.
It was at The Daily Caller where she was first exposed to the often chaotic GOP machine, learning the mysterious ways of Mr Trump, and befriending his closest allies.
“When I started covering Trump, I had just a better understanding of that orbit around him and the people that were surrounding themselves with him now,” Collins said in The New Yorker interview.
“It actually has been really beneficial to me, I think, as I’ve been covering him for the last eight years.”
Collins asks Mr Trump a question in the White House. She has become more familiar with him over the course of her career
It was also there that she got her first taste of television, making several appearances on Fox and CNN where she was notably critical of George Soros, branding him a “foreign-born, Left-wing guy” who wants to change the nature of America.
Collins has also been accused of criticising Black Lives Matter during the same appearance, saying it was a “problem” that Mr Soros had poured money into the movement to help it “further its agenda”.
These early interviews are often used as a stick to beat Collins’s credibility with, given she now works for a Left-leaning network.
Her switch to television came soon after a White House spring event in 2017, where she met CNN network president Jeff Zucker, and thanked him for having her make an appearance on the channel, despite the ideological difference of her employer.
Collins’s first gig at the network was as a political reporter, although she was briefly banned from the White House in 2018 after grilling Mr Trump about his ties to Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader.
Collins is subject to much ire online – Alex Brandon/AP
At the time, the White House Correspondents Association called the ban “wholly inappropriate, wrong-headed, and weak”.
For the 2020 presidential election Collins acted as CNN’s White House correspondent, and later promoted to chief in 2021.
She has hosted several shows on the network, including CNN This Morning and The Source with Kaitlan Collins.
Throughout her career, she has repeatedly sparred with Mr Trump.
Most recently, she was stopped from asking a question by the president during a round table with US ambassadors.
“Excuse me, I didn’t pick you,” Mr Trump tells her, swiftly moving on to another journalist.
In 2023, Collins hosted a forum with Republican voters in New Hampshire, where she quizzed Mr Trump on his claims the 2020 election was “stolen”.
During the 70-minute town hall Mr Trump repeatedly became frustrated with the anchor, at one point branding her a “nasty person”.
The Washington Post headlined their take: “CNN’s Kaitlan Collins tried, and tried, to rebut Trump’s election lies.” AP branded it a “big test” for Collins. MSNBC said it was “always doomed to fail”.
Collins is subject to much ire online, with pro-Maga accounts reposting some of her more awkward moments as memes, revelling in her censuring by the Trump administration.
The vitriol is so pertinent that “my dad will see things on Facebook about me and then call me to ask if it’s true,” she says.
Last week, the White House announced it would reshuffle the briefing room’s seating plan, putting mainstream media at the back and inviting favoured journalists to the front of the room where Collins normally sits.
Collins expects more grief to come.
“It doesn’t really bother me when [Mr Trump] gets upset at my questions, because our job is to ask the questions.
“He could respond however he wants to respond.
“That is his prerogative, and it shouldn’t really influence what you’re asking or how you’re asking it, in my view.”
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