Anderson Cooper defended his CNN colleague Kaitlan Collins on Wednesday night (June 3) after President Donald Trump once again insulted the reporter during an Oval Office press meeting.
Trump, who has frequently attacked Collins, turned on the journalist after she asked why he “decided to drop the Anti-Weaponization fund,” which was previously set up after the president settled a $10 billion lawsuit he’d filed against the IRS.
The president talked around the question before making personal digs at CNN and Collins. “CNN’s a very corrupt organization,” he said, per Mediaite, “with a corrupt reporter standing right there.”
He continued, “She’s a young, beautiful woman. Never smiles. I never see a smile on her face; I see her standing there with hatred in her eyes. 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.”
After playing a clip of the moment on his show Wednesday night, Cooper said, “I’m not asking Kaitlan about this because she’s got actual work to do, and she doesn’t need to be answering questions about this kind of behavior. That’s the president of the United States, a nearly 80-year-old man who has no problem commenting on her physical appearance and telling her she needs to smile.”
“That doesn’t happen to men,” he added. “No one’s ever said that to me in an office setting. She was there, like every other journalist doing her job, standing around with a bunch of non-smiling men, by the way, all behind her. I don’t know if you saw that. She gets singled out. Now, this, of course, is not the first time the president has focused on professional female reporters, Kaitlan included.”
Cooper then played a montage of clips of Trump insulting female reporters, including another of him telling Collins that she “never smiles,” and the infamous moment when he told Bloomberg News reporter Catherine Lucey, “quiet, piggy” aboard Air Force One.
“I don’t know why I’m surprised by this. I shouldn’t be,” Cooper said as he spoke with journalist Tara Palmeri. “It’s just bizarre that this is something he does over and over and over again. I mean, and I think people do it to women all the time.”
“What you are seeing is a day in the life of a woman,” Palmeri stated. “She’s a powerful woman, and he’s objectifying her, and he’s using a misogynistic comment about her appearance to belittle her.”
Cooper summed up the hypocrisy of the situation, saying, “It’s incredible to watch an entire press corps of men who are not smiling, standing around the president, asking him questions, looking very glum, and it’s the women he focuses on to belittle and besmirch.”
Anderson Cooper 360, Weeknights, 8/7c, CNN
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