With all the nasty things Trump has said about women and journalists, it's little wonder CNN's Kaitlan Collins, a native of Prattville, AL, somehow pushes his buttons

Kaitlan Collins interviews Donald Trump (NY Times)

Of all the attributes that make Donald Trump a wretched human being -- and he has enough to fill a new wing of the Smithsonian Institution -- many of them seem to be triggered by certain groups of people. 

One such group is women. Perhaps the two most famous examples of women crossing swords with Trump are Stormy Daniels and E. Jean Carroll. We can find nothing in the public record to indicate either Daniels or Carroll have wronged or harmed Trump in any way. They have stood up to Trump in court, with him losing in both instances, and that was enough to prompt him to hurl all kinds of invective in their direction. He has called Daniels "Horseface" and a "total con job." He has called Carroll a "whack job," a "nut job," and "mentally sick," adding that she is not his "type," even claiming that she "loved being sexually assaulted."

A second group that seems to trigger Trump is journalists, including the news outlets they work for. He has referred to journalists as "scum" and "slime," and mocked a reporter for having a disability. He has vowed to open up libel laws to sue journalists and said "we're going to have people suing you like you never got sued before." And let's not forget this chestnut:  "I would never kill them but I do hate them," he said of reporters. "And some of them are such lying, disgusting people."

Is it any wonder then that CNN's Kaitlan Collins, both a woman and a journalist, seems to bring out the worst in Trump -- and pulls it off just by doing her job. The most recent example of Trump trying to diss  Collins came on Wednesday (6/3/26). Here is how Lee Moran of HuffPost described the interaction:

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins highlighted a striking detail about Donald Trump’s latest personal attack on her.

Namely, it began before she had even asked the president a question.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of “The Source,” anchor Collins noted how Trump launched into a rant about CNN and her while railing against the Justice Department’s decision to drop its controversial $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” during an Oval Office event with reporters.

Before airing the clip, Collins stressed that Trump’s criticism was not actually prompted by anything she had said.

“And just to note, as you’re about to listen to this, this first exchange actually occurred before I had yet to ask the president a question,” she told viewers.

In the exchange, Trump called CNN “crooked as hell” and “a very corrupt organization” and called Collins a “corrupt reporter.” (A video of the interaction can be viewed at this link.)

That Collins could make an insightful comment about a peculiar trait of a human interaction tells you immediately that she is much smarter than Trump -- after all, this is a president who does not listen to anyone, so how would he be able to catch an unusual detail of a back and forth? The answer is he can't, and that suggests Trump knows he is an intellectual lightweight compared to Collins. That has to gnaw at a president with an ego the size of Jupiter, so it probably explains the interaction that took place next, as described by Moran:

“Never smiles. A young, beautiful woman. Never smiles,” Trump said of Collins. “I never see a smile on her face. I see her standing there with hatred in her eyes, like, she has hatred because we have borders, because we have a strong military, because we cut our taxes, because we do things that everybody wanted and then we win our election in a massive landslide.”

Trump must have been really irked because he immediately turned to his favorite rhetorical tactic -- lying. His administration does "things that everybody wanted"? First, Trump won the 2024 election over Kamala Harris by 49.9 percent to 48.4 percent, a popular-vote margin of about 1.5 percentage points.  That hardly is a landslide.

As for Trump's other assertions, he thinks Americans wanted wars with Venezuela and Iran, threats against Greenland and Denmark, torn relationships with NATO allies, endless puckering up to Putin's ass, tax cuts for wealthy elites, attacks on the right to vote, appointments of sycophants and loyalists while tossing government experts out of their jobs, detaining and deporting migrants without granting the due process required by law (and in the process, signing off on what essentially are state-sanctioned kidnappings), attacks on biomedical research and federal funding that Congress already has approved, cuts to funding at American universities -- including prominent and elite institutions such as Harvard, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, UCLA, Brown, Princeton, and Duke? (In Kaitlan Collins' home state of Alabama, the Trump administration has made cuts to the renowned biomedical research enterprise at UAB, which ranks with Duke and the University of North Carolina as top recipients of federal research grants in the South.) Also, international scholars long have been known to make valuable contributions to the educational and research missions at American universities. But Trump has restricted foreign student enrollment and slashed programs that assist international and migrant scholars. As a result, enrollment of foreign students at U.S. universities dropped by 20 percent in spring 2026. 

The bottom line: The U.S. is home to some confused, disengaged, gullible, easily enraged people -- people who vote based on their fear of change and prejudice toward those they see as "other." But Trump needs a refresher course on the U.S. electorate if he thinks Americans wanted the things he has delivered. A quick look at his latest approval ratings -- if he has the guts to check them -- will reveal that his countrymen are not as shallow as he thinks. 

Heck, according to the Silver Bulletin, Trump's approval rating even is underwater in Texas. Embarrassments don't come much greater than that for a Republican president. Tanking approval ratings might be one reason Trump was so touchy this week with Kaitlan Collins. Here is more from the HuffPost report:

Later, when Collins did ask Trump whether the [Anti-Weaponization Fund] was “dead” or merely “on hold,” the president said he would “have to ask the lawyers” before again slamming “fake news CNN,” telling Collins to “be quiet” and that she should “be ashamed of herself.”

Collins said Trump appeared “clearly irritated” by questions surrounding why “his administration says it is not moving forward with that $1.8 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund,’ as they have called it.”