Kaitlan Collins: 5 Things On The CNN Anchor Hosting Trump Town Hall

The ‘CNN This Morning’ host will sit down with the former president to moderate a town hall in New Hampshire. Find out more about Kaitlan Collins here.

Kaitlan Collins is one of the most popular anchors on CNN. She began making appearances on the news network in 2017, before she was hired. She joined the network full-time in 2017, and was featured in a number of different roles. She now co-hosts CNN This Morning alongside Poppy Harlow, a role she’s had since late 2022.

As one of the leading journalists covering the White House in recent years, Kaitlan covered both Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden. She moderated a town hall by Trump ahead of the 2024 election for CNN on Wednesday, May 10. The event was held St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. “This event with former President Trump will be the first of many for CNN in the coming months as CNN correspondents travel across the country to hear directly from voters in the runup to the 2024 presidential election,” the news network said in a press release.

During the town hall, Kaitlan fact-checked Trump on a few different issues and pressed him to admit that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, but he continued to double down. He even called her a “nasty person” when she pressed him on the FBI investigation into him taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. Find out more about Kaitlan here.

Kaitlan began her media career with The Daily Caller

Before joining CNN, Kaitlan was a reporter for the right-wing news site The Daily Caller, which was co-founded by former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. During her time at The Daily Caller, Kaitlan covered entertainment for the site, per Adweek. She later pivoted to covering the 2016 election and was the site’s White House correspondent for the beginning of Trump’s administration, according to her bio.

She regularly covered Trump at the start of her career

With her early career focusing on Trump, Kaitlan is a perfect candidate for the town hall. She explained that she felt like her skill set was perfectly suited to covering the former president even during his campaign. “I never even thought about not covering every minute of him,” she told Forbes in a 2021 interview.

She also explained that she had very thick skin to endure personal attacks from the former president and his administration. “I think with Trump, it helped that I’m not a very emotional person, so even though I was getting so many calls and messages asking if I was okay, it truly didn’t faze me at all. It was just what you came to expect from the Trump White House,” she told Forbes.

She was the youngest Chief White House Correspondent for CNN

Kaitlan joined CNN as a White House correspondent in July 2017, where she continued her coverage of Trump. As the 2020 election approached, she also hit the road to cover him on the campaign trail, covering his rallies through the COVID-19 pandemic for the news network. Ahead of Biden’s inauguration, she was promoted to Chief White House Correspondent, and at 28, she was one of the youngest people to hold that title for a major news network and the youngest to do so for CNN. She moved to CNN This Morning in September 2022. She’s regularly been praised for her coverage and was called one of the “Most Influential People In News Media” by Mediaite for many years.

The Trump administration once barred her from an event for asking about Putin

One of the most controversial moments in Kaitlan’s career included when she shouted questions at Trump when she served as a pool reporter during a photo-op in July 2018. She questioned him about Russian President Vladimir Putin and his former lawyer Michael Cohen, but he refused to answer. Trump refused to answer her questions, but after the fact, she was not allowed to attend a press conference held in the White House Rose Garden, per ABC News. While the White House disputed that she was “banned,” the White House Correspondents Association denounced the decision to not allow her to attend. “This type of retaliation is wholly inappropriate, wrong-headed, and weak. It cannot stand,” WHCA President Olivier Knox said in a statement.

Reflecting on the incident, Kaitlan explained that she learned how quickly White House reporters became part of news stories during Trump’s presidency. “I quickly became the story when they kicked me out of that event and then tried to dispute that they’d banned us,” she told Forbes. “You had to really make sure you were always on your game so that no one could question you or your credibility.”

She graduated from the University of Alabama in 2014

Before beginning her career as a journalist, Kaitlan was a student at the University of Alabama. She was a double major in political science and journalism, and during her time she was a member of the Alpha Phi sorority. Since becoming a journalist, Kaitlan has apologized for using some offensive language in tweets when she was a student. “When I was in college, I used ignorant language in a few tweets to my friends. It was immature but it doesn’t represent the way I feel at all. I regret it and apologize,” she said in a 2018 tweet.