OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Years before she became a star at CNN and was moderating a town hall event with former President Donald Trump, Kaitlin Collins worked for the right-leaning news site The Daily Caller, which was co-founded by Tucker Carlson in 2010.
And during that time, she became the outlet’s White House correspondent, learning first-hand how things worked with the media in the nation’s capital.
In a newly resurfaced 2017 interview with Carlson, Collins made some revealing statements about her media colleagues and about Trump that would appear to differ from her stances today.
As reported by Mediaite, Collins previously worked at the right-leaning Daily Caller during the period when founder and now-former Fox News star Tucker Carlson was leading the organization.
In March 2017, Collins provided an alternative viewpoint on the Trump White House during an interview on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” just two months into Trump’s presidency.
“The press is throwing a royal tantrum because they can’t control what the country is talking about. For the last eight years, they’ve all decided what the question should be, and they’ve all gone in there and asked the same question. And now that they’re not being called on, they can’t control what the news is about, and it’s driving them crazy,” she said.
She added that the media were a “little hysterical” because they were being criticized by the then-president, who often referred to them as “fake news.”
“But what president has not hated the press? We make their lives harder, and they all hate us. They may not all talk about it, but they definitely hate us. So but people are taking it really personally. And you shouldn’t take the president’s criticism personally. It shouldn’t affect your reporting,” she said then.
WATCH:
Kaitlan Collins Once Defended Trump’s Attacks On Press — Including CNN — In Interview With Tucker Carlson!
It looks like she will say whatever the highest bidder asks her to say or maybe she's just been corrupted by spending too much time on CNN.
However, it is revealing to… pic.twitter.com/JylEdIrKwB
— 𝘿𝙤𝙣 𝙋𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚𝙧 (@DonGP4037) May 15, 2023
“But you can tell when you read The New York Times and CNN that it does affect their reporting, and that’s not what should happen. I don’t take my cues from the president, I report on him. I don’t report to him,” Collins told Carlson.
Collins went on to say that the White House mainstream media stars were ticked off because Trump “calls them up by their names, and they don’t like that. And then they get a lot of hate on Twitter, and then it makes them resent him, not for his policies and not for not following through on his campaign promises, but for who he is as a person. And that’s not your job. Your job is not to get your feelings hurt.”
Referencing the White House Press Corps, Collins added that Twitter “feeds their egos. They like to know how many people follow them, who’s praising them.”
During his town hall with Collins, Trump appeared to get bolder with her as the evening progressed. And the reason for that has been revealed.
According to Axios, during the first commercial break, Trump adviser Jason Miller showed the former president tweets backstage from Democrats who were ripping CNN for hosting Trump and claimed that he was winning.
“Why it matters: Trump, who had been getting miffed at Collins’ persistent questioning, went out all pumped up for the second block,” the outlet reported.
A Trump confidant told Axios: “He was the leader of the free world again.”
The outlet continued:
Trump craves approbation to the point that some aides used to carry around positive polls about him so they could whip them out to show him as a little treat if he started getting grumpy.
Among the tweets, Trump was shown was one by Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who posted 23 minutes into the town hall (before the first commercial break at about 8:40 p.m. ET).
Several Democrats and their media surrogates took CNN to task for giving Trump air time, but CEO Chris Licht has defended the decision, as did host Anderson Cooper.
