31-year-old Kaitlan Collins had one of the biggest assignments of her burgeoning career Wednesday as she moderated the CNN town hall with former President Donald Trump. Bill O’Reilly didn’t come away impressed with her performance.
Collins often clashed with the former President over his accusation that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, before he ultimately called her “a nasty person”.
“Her job is to get information from him, not to debate him, but unfortunately, Miss Collins is a young woman with not a lot of experience,” O’Reilly told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo.
O’Reilly then argued that the line of questioning from Collins was combative and confrontational, rather than information-seeking.
“There are different kinds of interviews. You have to be a surgeon in some interviews and in other interviews a boxing match because you go boom, boom, boom. This wasn’t a boxing match,” O’Reilly said. “So let me give you a very clear example. Kaitlan Collins’ question about January 6, an important question, by the way, went on for about 90 seconds…Trump loses interest in the first 10 seconds. He’s already got his answer that he said a million times. What I would have done, and that I did do in an interview with Trump, is say, ‘Did you wait too long before you called off the rioters at the Capitol?’
“How long did that take? 5 seconds. He’s not going to answer, he’s going to dive, but then you go back. ‘Can you just answer my question? Did you wait too long?’ That’s how you interview Donald Trump.”
Cuomo defended his former CNN colleague by saying interviewing Trump in a town hall format is not “an easy task”, adding that it is “an impossible position”.
O’Reilly claimed that Collins continually saying the 2020 election wasn’t stolen or rigged was “pointless” because Trump “was never going to concede” the point.
The comments on [Cuomo] fly in the face of previous comments O’Reilly made about Collins. When the event was first announced, the former cable news host called the CNN This Morning anchor “a professional journalist” and applauded the decision to use her as the moderator.
