UPDATE, 8/8/20, 5:47pm ET: Donald Trump stormed out of a August 8 press conference in Bedminster, New Jersey, when Paula Reid asked him why he has lied about passing the Veterans Choice Act. The act was passed in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama. Trump has claimed innumerable times that it’s his program. The president abruptly ended the press conference and walked off as “YMCA” played.
ORIGINAL: CBS news correspondent Paula Reid, 37, stood up to President Donald Trump at his daily press briefing about the coronavirus on Apr. 13. She refused to back down from her line of questioning when he tried to talk over, and called her names when she asked why his administration failed to prepare America for the virus during the month of February. “The argument is you bought yourself some time. You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals, you didn’t use it to ramp up testing. 21 million people are unemployed. Tens of thousands of Americans are dead…How is this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?” she said before Trump stepped over Paula’s questioning to tell her, “you’re so disgraceful. It’s so disgraceful the way you say that.”
She kept hammering away, asking “But what did you do with the time you bought? The month of February was a gap. The entire month of February.” Trump tried to argue that there were no cases in the United States and she corrected him, that there were cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. during February. “Zero cases, zero deaths on Jan. 17,” Trump claimed. Paula reiterated “February. The entire month of February. Your video has a complete gap. What did your administration do in the month of February with what your travel ban bought you?” Trump then got nasty and called her a “fake.” We’ve got five things to know about Paula.
1. Paula is CBS News’ Chief White House correspondent. Her duties for the network include covering the White House, the Justice Department and legal affairs. She’s been with CBS since 2010.
2. Paula’s exchanges with Trump have made headlines before. She fact checked him in Nov. 2018 on the fake claim that he and President Barack Obama‘s administration had the same policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. In answering her question, Trump said “Obama had a separation policy; we all had the same policy,” to which Paula said “You did not…” before he interrupted to say, “I tried to do it differently, but Obama had a separation policy. But people don’t like to talk about that.” Paula corrected him, saying “Sir, it was different. You decided to prosecute everyone at the border.” Trump then cut off her line of questioning.
3. Paula is brave when it comes to her reporting. Not only is she willing to spar with Trump to get true facts out, she was one of the only network news reporters on the ground during the deadly Aug. 2017 white supremacists rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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4. Paula is highly educated and has a law degree. She graduated from Virginia’s College of William & Mary in 2005 where she double majored in psychology and English. Paula went on to get her law degree (JD) from Villanova University School Law and passed the Bar Exams in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. As if that wasn’t enough, she received her Masters in Bioethics (MBE) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016.
5. Paula is married. She lives with her husband Jason Kolsevich in Washington D.C. They married in April 2018 in Ipswich, MA near Paula’s hometown.