A single question about Russia sanctions outside the White House earned CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins a presidential verdict on her intelligence.
President Donald Trump turned on Collins while speaking to reporters outside the White House on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026, after she pressed him on whether his decision to waive sweeping new sanctions on Russia was connected to the release of Stephen Hubbard, an American teacher detained there since 2022.
“You don’t know anything, I mean, you’re fake news CNN,” Trump told Collins, defending his decision to hold off on the sanctions.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re a dummy. You’re a low-IQ person. You’re a dummy, and you work for CNN,” he said.
The Teacher Trump Says He Freed
Collins, 34, had raised the waiver after Trump said he gave up nothing to secure the American’s return. Hubbard, 74, is a teacher originally from Michigan. Trump said the man had been imprisoned in Siberia or somewhere else in Russia, and that he was coming home because of him. The waiver was necessary during the negotiations, Trump said, and Hubbard would not have been released otherwise.
Collins answered that what he had just described amounted to the administration giving something up in exchange. Trump rejected the premise of her question. “Use your head,” he said.
Then Came “Another Faker”
Soon afterward, ABC News White House correspondent Karen Travers pressed him on the same subject. Trump asked whether she was a stupid person and who she worked for. She told him ABC News.
“You’re a stupid person. And by the way, your network is the worst of all,” Trump said.
The White House posted both clips on X. Trump “demolishes Fake News” Collins, it wrote, with a crying-with-laughter emoji. Travers it labeled “another Faker.”
It was not Trump’s only clash with a reporter that week. In the Oval Office, he told correspondent Andrew Feinberg to “be careful” after Feinberg questioned why a new whistleblower program pays a 1% commission when the False Claims Act can award at least 10%. Vice President JD Vance called it a “fundamentally dishonest question.” When Feinberg moved on to Trump’s golf courses, the president asked whether he was “a sick person.”
The Candidate Who Disagrees With Him
Collins’ question had started with the rally Trump was flying to that night. She asked what Sen. Darline Graham, the South Carolina Republican he was set to rally for, had told him about lifting sanctions her brother had fought for. Darline Graham was appointed in July to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham and is running for a full term. The sanctions are part of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which was named for him and signed into law in September.
On that night’s episode of “The Source,” Collins played the footage of Trump going after her and Travers, then pointed out that the candidate he was campaigning for had broken with him on the sanctions. She aired Darline Graham saying she would choose to keep the pressure on Russia to end the war and bring gas prices down, because she does not trust Russia. Collins also played clips of the late senator, who in October 2025 criticized countries that buy cheap Russian oil.
White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers said in a statement to the Daily Beast that enforcing the sanctions provisions now would impede U.S. efforts to negotiate a durable peace between Ukraine and Russia, and that Trump keeps the ability to use those authorities whenever he determines it advances national interests.
Collins became CNN’s youngest chief White House correspondent in 2021, at 29, and returned to that role in November 2024 while keeping her anchor chair. Her access has been contested before: in July 2018 the White House barred her from a Rose Garden event after she asked Trump about his former attorney Michael Cohen. More recently, Trump moved to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, and a federal judge temporarily blocked the restrictions and ordered the outlets’ access restored.
Three days after calling Collins a dummy, Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday, Oct. 24, to knock down a report that he intended to rip out the briefing room and restore the swimming pool beneath it. “Although I may move the Fake News to a less obnoxious location, the old swimming pool will never be brought back,” he wrote.