CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins spoke with Anderson Cooper tonight after a terse exchange between her and President Donald Trump at Monday’s press briefing.
Tonight Anderson Cooper spoke with Collins and remarked, “The idea that, you know, the president is so flustered and that he flees a press conference because you are asking to ask a question when called on is kind of remarkable.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called on and then not allowed to ask a question after that just because I let another reporter follow up, which is, as you noted, standard operating procedure for these briefings,” Collins said. “That’s the whole point of following up a question so then the president can’t avoid questions he doesn’t like or doesn’t want to answer by just calling on another reporter. It was kind of quiet in the Rose Garden after the president turned around and left. There wasn’t applause like there is typically from his guests that he invites or staffers. We all just kind of stood there for a moment. But clearly the president did not want to continue that exchange with that reporter.”
Cooper likened the president’s performance at the briefing to a “charlatan” trying to convince an audience with brazen lies:
“It’s so interesting when you see a charlatan try to convince you of
something, because a lot of times what they say is so obviously untrue, but it’s also kind of depending on just the brazenness of the lie. And it sort of is based on the idea that everybody else is a moron and doesn’t pick up on the lie when you actually have the president saying yet again anyone who wants a test can get one, which he said at the CDC. Wasn’t true then, isn’t true today. His own admiral says, well, it’s anyone who needs a test can get one with a doctor’s recommendation, etc., and then he comes out and again just ignores what he just said and just repeats the lie again. I mean, it’s the most obvious microcosmic example of just the president’s strategy to just invent his own history and make up his own facts.”
On Trump’s repeated comments about testing, Collins added, “A lot of it, Anderson, has to do I thinkw with… the failure and the criticism about the failure of testing is something that’s one of the most sensitive points with the president and that’s why I think the which you see him talk about testing the way he does is because he is sensitive to that criticism.”
You can watch above, via CNN.