It’s hardly a secret that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins aren’t exactly BFFs. Collins and Leavitt have butted heads on numerous occasions, leading to rumors of a brewing feud. From a heated exchange between the two where Leavitt refused to acknowledge Collins’ follow-up question about a U.S. intelligence leak, to a question Collins’ later asked National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, sending Leavitt into a rage-fueled tailspin (and resulting in an online pile-on), Leavitt might have been hoping to escape Collins for a bit when she followed President Donald Trump to Alaska for his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin regrading the war in Ukraine. However, considering that Collins is CNN’s chief White House correspondent, there wasn’t much chance of that happening. Collins still had a job to do, after all. Still, you just know that Leavitt was throwing some side-eye across the briefing room.
In an early-morning post to her Instagram Stories on August 15, Leavitt expressed excitement over her “day trip to Alaska.” We’re not quite sure how long that excitement lasted once it became clear that the relatively chilly summer weather of The Last Frontier wasn’t going to be enough to keep Collins away.
For her part, Collins partially documented her own visit to Alaska on Instagram Stories, and while it doesn’t seem like she and Leavitt had any kind of meaningful interaction with one another at the summit, given the Gabbard incident, we wouldn’t be surprised if Collins and CNN’s critical coverage of Trump’s meeting with Putin had Leavitt fuming a little.
What did Kaitlan Collins say about Trump’s Alaska summit?
Kaitlan Collins and her CNN colleagues ultimately appeared relatively nonplussed by Donald Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, given that it ended without an announcement regarding a potential ceasefire in Ukraine, which Russia invaded back in early 2022. Per CNN’s Jake Tapper on X (formerly Twitter), Trump commented, “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.” In his post, Tapper also noted that “no achievements [were] announced,” and that Trump and Putin did not take any questions from the press. (Hey! Refusing questions is supposed to be Karoline Leavitt’s job!)
Collins herself expressed a similar sentiment during her on-air report. “When they were talking about the sticking points, that they had agreed on some, there was still one big sticking point … they didn’t go into detail onto what that one big sticking point is, there was a question going into this, that we had heard from Kremlin experts saying, ‘Putin is trying to buy himself time. And if he can make it look like he is trying to get to a deal with President Trump, maybe that would help kick the can down the road,'” the reporter said in a clip she also shared on X. Regarding the fact that the world leaders didn’t take questions, Collins described the event as “the press conference that wasn’t” in the post caption. Leavitt’s X account, meanwhile, has been sharing posts amplifying Trump’s positive spin on the summit.
