President Donald Trump has been at war with the mainstream media for years.
CNN keeps testing his patience anyway.
And now Trump delivered a brutal midnight diagnosis that left Kaitlan Collins and her network reeling.
The United Nations Standoff That Set Trump Off
Trump announced on September 18 that he was banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, warning in a Truth Social post that “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”
The next day, reporters from those three outlets had the Secret Service take away their press credentials.
So when Trump showed up at the United Nations headquarters and spotted CNN cameras waiting for him, he wasn’t exactly thrilled.
The president was surprised to see CNN represented at the UN headquarters in spite of the ban.
“I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me. You shouldn’t be here!” Trump said as he and First Lady Melania Trump arrived at the building.
Collins responded, “The United Nations allowed us in, sir.”
“You should not be here covering me,” Trump continued.
He then put his right hand up as if to say “shut up” when reporters started shouting questions at him, before walking into the building with the First Lady at his side.
CNN didn’t exactly return the favor once inside.
Soon after, CNN blew off covering Trump’s UN speech while it happened, with Situation Room co-host Wolf Blitzer explaining at the top of the show that the network had a live feed available but wouldn’t be airing the address in full.
Trump Lets Loose Just Before Midnight
That’s when things got interesting.
The president didn’t hold back in a Truth Social post, which he shared at 11:53 p.m ET.
He wrote, “All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like Third Rate ‘Reporter,’ Kaitlan Collins, of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like Lunatics, in the Press Area, at the United Nations? Why was she there?”
He accused Collins of being a “truly unhappy person” who was nothing more than a third rate “reporter,” before lumping her in with the rest of the “treasonous” mainstream press.
Here’s the part that’s going to stick.
Trump wrote that “She’s got a ‘TRUMP’ addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC.”
He went on to say “They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented! The ‘good news’ is that they have a great, for them, and totally disloyal Judge.”
MS NOW is the new name for the network longtime viewers still call MSNBC.
Trump’s shorthand for it, “MSDNC,” has been a running jab for years, and it fits about as well as it ever has.
A Network That Can’t Quit Him
Collins, who serves as CNN’s chief White House correspondent, has spent years positioned as one of the network’s most prominent Trump antagonists.
It’s worth pointing out that even inside Trump’s own orbit, the relationship with Collins is complicated.
Collins has said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt once stepped in to help her when Saudi royal guards grew agitated with her during an overseas trip early in Trump’s second term.
So this isn’t a simple story of one side never speaking to the other.
It’s a network that built its entire brand on opposition to Trump, banned from the briefing room, still showing up anyway, and a president who can’t quite let it go either.
That’s the actual story here.
What Does This Midnight Meltdown Actually Tell Us?
CNN spent the better part of a decade insisting it doesn’t cover Trump out of obsession, just out of duty.
But when a network gets formally banned from White House coverage and still sends a chief correspondent to shout questions at the president overseas, that argument gets a lot harder to make with a straight face.
Trump’s diagnosis, crude as it is, lands on something real.
CNN’s ratings have never recovered from the collapse of the Russia collusion narrative, the network’s uneven handling of COVID-era public health messaging, or its wall-to-wall coverage habits during the 2020 election cycle.
And yet the network keeps chasing Trump around the globe rather than covering the stories its own dwindling audience says it actually wants.
That’s not journalism driven by public interest.
That looks a lot more like a fixation.
Trump has been banning outlets, revoking credentials, and picking fights with individual reporters since his first term, and none of it has slowed CNN down for a single news cycle.
If anything, the network appears to treat access denial as content, turning every locked-out correspondent into a segment about press freedom rather than reflecting on why so much of the country stopped trusting it in the first place.
The reference to a “totally disloyal Judge” is Trump’s way of tying this latest flare-up to the broader pattern of lawfare he and his allies have described for years, the same permanent-bureaucracy and legal-system resistance that has dogged his agenda since he first took office.
Whether or not any particular judge fits that description in this instance, the framing reflects a consistent theme from this White House: that institutional resistance to Trump extends well past the press and into the courts.
None of this is likely to end with a ban.
CNN will keep showing up.
Trump will keep calling them sleazebags.
And Kaitlan Collins will keep getting singled out by name, because in this White House’s telling, she’s exhibit A for a press corps that can’t stop covering the man it claims to be done with.
Source: Mediaite, “Trump Diagnoses CNN’s Kaitlan Collins With a Full-Blown POTUS ‘Addiction’ in Blistering Late-Night Rant”