Donald Trump Goes Haywire On CNN's Kaitlan Collins With Rude 8-Word Takedown

Just in case you were wondering, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins' bitter feud with Donald Trump isn't slowing down anytime soon. Over the years, Trump has proven time and time again that Collins gets under his skin. Never forget the time Trump delivered a menacing reply to one of Collins' questions while flying high aboard Air Force One. Or the time Trump got catty with Collins for asking him about his decision to stop sending military aid to Ukraine. 

President Trump on why he pardoned the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance and whether it has anything to do with his own family's crypto business: pic.twitter.com/ugaTljBJM0

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) October 23, 2025

Alas, the contentious relationship between Trump and Collins reached a whole new level in a press conference on October 23, when Collins pressed Trump about the reasoning behind his decision to pardon billionaire and Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao. She also pressed Trump as to whether or not Zhao's ties to the Trump family's crypto business had anything to do with the pardon. "A lot of people say that he wasn't guilty of anything," Trump insisted. And that's when Collins seized the moment, interjecting that Zhao did in fact confess to the crimes he was charged with. Trump went haywire with a brutal eight-word takedown: "You know nothing about nothing. You're fake news." 

Trump went on to defend the former Binance CEO, saying: "I don't know him. I don't believe I've ever met him, but I've been told ... he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime. ... he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people." 

This isn't the first time President Donald Trump has clapped back at members of the press by insulting their supposed lack of professionalism — and he doesn't save all of his aggression for CNN's Kaitlan Collins, either. In fact, on October 22, just one day prior to his brutal takedown of Collins, he took Reuters' White House Correspondent Jeff Mason to task for questioning him about claims that he hadn't been "transparent" about his construction plans for the extravagant and costly White House State Ballroom and the demolition of the White House's historical East Wing. "I haven't been transparent? Really?" he asked (via Mediaite). "I've shown this to everybody that would listen. Third-rate reporters didn't see it because they didn't look. You're a third-rate reporter, always have been."

That wasn't the first time Trump threw out the insult "third-rate reporter" either. In 2018, the POTUS referred to New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman as such. He repeated a variation of the insult last November in a Truth Social rant in which he also referred to the journalist as "Magot" instead of her name. "Will the failing New York Times apologize to its readers for getting years of 'Trump' coverage so wrong," he wrote. "They write such phony 'junk,' knowing full well how incorrect it is, only meaning to demean. Magot Hagerman, a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her."