CNN host Kaitlan Collins says President Donald Trump is not a morning person.
“He doesn’t really do much in the morning,” Collins said on The New Yorker podcast Friday. “Maybe he’ll be posting, but he’s not doing a lot of meetings or press conferences or anything.”
The work ramps up midday, she said, and Trump doesn’t sleep much at night.
“You wake up to a Truth Social post from him about how he’s voiding all the pardons that President Biden issued,” she said.
The 32-year-old CNN anchor went viral this week for going head-to-head with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. Collins had asked Leavitt for evidence to back up Trump’s claim that former President Joe Biden’s pardons were void. Leavitt shot back, “You’re a reporter, you should find out.”
Collins—whom Trump has dubbed a “nasty person”— takes the hostility with grace.
“My job is to ask questions and get answers,” she told host Clare Malone.
In that way, she says she’s not unlike 27-year-old Leavitt, the youngest-ever White House press secretary.
“There’s a job to do for each of us,” Collins said, and “her job is to spin for her boss.”
Collins said she recently watched some old interviews of Trump and realized how much reporters underestimated him—especially when he first announced his run.
“A lot of people did not take him seriously and did not believe that he had the political power that we now [or] his biggest critics will acknowledge he has,” she said.
How times have changed.
“Talk to any Democrat, and they’ll acknowledge Trump has the firmest grip on the Republican Party that anyone has had in decades,” she added.
Collins said the world of social media has also changed dramatically, particularly on X. Since Elon Musk took over, the platform is a “vastly different environment” than before, she said.
“You do see how people can have their beliefs reinforced so easily by going online and choosing their [social media] platform,” she said. “My dad will see things on Facebook about me and then call me and ask me if it’s true sometimes.”
Collins further recalled being shocked at Trump’s fight with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during what was supposed to be a polite discussion on how to ensure a peaceful end to the Ukraine-Russia war. Collins was in the Oval Office when the screaming match went down, and Trump and Vice President JD Vance demanded that the Ukrainian leader show more appreciation for America’s wartime support. Trump had called Zelensky a “dictator” shortly before the conversation.
“We knew it would be tense, we knew it would be noteworthy,” she said. “We had no idea that it was going to be like that.”
Despite press pool challenges and Trump’s cries of “fake news,” Leavitt said the president cares deeply about what journalists have to say.
At the end of the day, Trump is “someone who seeks the validation of the press as much as he criticizes them publicly.”
