CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Offers Credit To Former Boss Tucker Carlson: ‘If I Hadn’t Worked at Daily Caller, I Don’t Know If I’d Be Covering Trump’

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins credited her former boss Tucker Carlson with helping to push her to her current position covering the White House.

Collins spoke with Vanity Fair for a profile piece published on Friday where she discussed her dual roles with CNN anchoring The Source and serving as the network’s chief White House correspondent. Before joining CNN, Collins worked as a White House correspondent for The Daily Caller.

“If I hadn’t worked at the Daily Caller, I don’t know if I’d be covering Trump,” Collins said, crediting Daily Caller founder Carlson as the primary one encouraging her reporting on the 2016 presidential election.

Collins worked for The Daily Caller from 2014-2017.

She called it “helpful” to be covering Trump’s political ascent while she was working with “Trumpish people.”

“[It] was helpful to me in covering Trump because it was all these Trump-ish people, people who went on to become huge Trump supporters, including Tucker, and I worked with him every day,” Collins said.

She added, however, that some of those loyal Trump backers did not start that way.

“I have never been like, opinionated or ideological, but I could see the shifting on the right of, being like, they didn’t love Trump either, and then totally embraced him when they realized that he was gonna be the nominee,” Collins said.

Collins also discussed concerns about current administration’s tensions with media outlets, including the Associated Press. The outlet was banned by Trump’s administration from White House events for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” as the president prefers. Collins likened the situation to her own ban from a 2018 Rose Garden event. A federal judge ordered this week that AP be reinstated by the White House.

Collins recalled that the White House Correspondents Association, which Trump’s team has also had tensions with, backed her during her own ban, and she also singled out Fox News’ Bret Baier for his support.

“When you start taking people away, or removing people or banning them, that is where it’s dangerous territory,” she said. “That’s kind of the moment we’re at now.”