CNN’s Kaitlan Collins does not like conservatives, Republicans, or Donald Trump. Note one bit. Collins has difficulty presenting any stories featuring Trump without telegraphing her disdain through irrelevant, needling questions, and sour looks on her face while in the anchor chair.
The two got a chance to face each other in person during a meeting Trump held in the Oval Office, before the press, with El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele. Bukele is known for his tough on crime stance; he launched a hard crackdown on drug gangs on other criminals in 2020 which sent the crime rate in his country plummeting. The contrast with the then-Biden administration’s weakness—many would call it encouragement—toward lawlessness could not have been starker. While violent crimes like murders decreased in 2023, that was compared to a surge during 2021 that Democrats would like to attribute to “the pandemic,” but that tracks with the administration’s turning a blind eye to lawlessness like the BLM riots in 2020 that resulted in dozens of deaths and $2 billion in property damage.
Trump and Bukele have been working together to deal with violent gang members who illegally jump the U.S. border. The deal between the U.S. and El Salvador allows the U.S. to ship these criminals to El Salvador where they’ll go to prison, in exchange for American money.
What’s got many Americans riled is the news that an illegal alien deported from the U.S. to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia, who a court ruled was improperly deported. The judge ordered the U.S. to “facilitate” Garcia’s return. Countering this, Attorney General Pam Bondi said Garcia is an illegal alien whom immigration courts had already determined was a member of the international MS-13 gang.
That’s what the oval office fight was about. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked the president what he was going to do about getting Abrego Garcia out of a Salvadoran prison. Trump advisor Stephen Miller said the U.S. could not tell El Salvador what to do with a non-U.S. citizen in his country’s custody. Miller called the very idea “arrogant,” and dressed down Collins and the U.S. media.
Prolific X user Collin Rugg has video of the exchange:
Miller reiterated that Garcia was illegally in the U.S., and that he’s a known member of a violent international gang. Collins kept pressing, asking if the administration “was saying” that it wouldn’t ask for Garcia’s return. He noted that a recent Supreme Court decision allowed the U.S. to deport Garcia again, in the future, if El Salvador, “in its sole discretion,” returned the man to the U.S. Spoiler: El Salvador is not going to do that.
Collins seemed to have trouble understanding that the U.S. can’t demand that El Salvador return its own citizen. It is unclear why she and other members of the left would want a Salvadoran gang member back in America.
The response from X users was pretty unanimous, with most people saying that Collins lost this one badly.
