Shawn McCreesh and Kaitlan Collins on the Wild World of Life on the Trump Beat

As a New York Times White House correspondent, Shawn McCreesh has been in the room for everything—the spectacle, the absurdity, the darkness—and he writes about it with the eye of someone who can’t quite believe what they’re seeing. The 33-year-old Pennsylvania native started in journalism as Maureen Dowd’s assistant and recently went viral with an example of the unflinching reporting he’s known for, pressing Trump on whether Iran bombed its own school using a U.S. Tomahawk missile. He sat down with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins over cocktails and tartare at Minetta Tavern in D.C. to talk about what it’s really like trying to hold this wacky White House to account.

WEDNESDAY 10 PM, APRIL 22, 2026, WASHINGTON, D.C.

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SHAWN McCREESH: Hi, Kaitlan.

KAITLAN COLLINS: Hi, Shawn.

McCREESH: It’s good to see you as we head into Correspondents’ Dinner weekend.

COLLINS: This is always when I reflect on covering Trump, because I got my job at CNN during the Correspondents’ Dinner weekend nine years ago.

McCREESH: So it’s sort of a full-circle moment?

COLLINS: Yes, and Trump has never attended as a sitting president, but it sounds like he and his whole cabinet will be there, which is interesting given the recent changes. Were you in South Dakota the day Kristi Noem was fired?

McCREESH: No, but I was there when the Daily Mail dropped the story about her husband.

COLLINS: And published his pictures. I got so many alarmed texts from people at the White House that day. How did you end up covering that?

McCREESH: It was really just a crazy stroke of luck. I’d been interested in what the hell was going on with that marriage after Noem was asked about Corey Lewandowski in that congressional hearing. I felt like, “This woman has a husband…” It’s the other obvious element to the story and I thought, “What if you went out there and got him to talk to you?” I knew there was a very slim chance it could happen, but my editors could see I was excited about it and flew me out there. When I woke up on the second day and saw that wild Daily Mail story, this esoteric long-shot story became news because everybody was riveted by it. I spit the story out on deadline in my hotel room later that night.

COLLINS: What has covering the Trump White House been like? It’s definitely not a conventional reporting job.

McCREESH: Every single week we’re like, “What’s this going to be?” I had this whole sub-beat for the first year where I reported on things like the Kennedy Center. I had no idea he was going to come down here and hijack the opera, the ballet, the symphony, throw a bunch of cronies in there, and run the thing into the ground. It ended up being this really juicy story, like a Coen brothers farce about a right-wing racket running a performing arts venue. It was really fascinating because you could see all his other Washington storylines replicating themselves inside this literal playhouse.

COLLINS: I’ve covered Trump since the day he took office in 2017. When he first started making tweaks to the Oval Office, someone told me, “Oh yeah, he wants to do a lot of redecorating.” We had no idea that meant the entire extended Washington area.

McCREESH: I cannot overstate enough to people who are not here how much he is warping the entire town, from the Kennedy Center and the public golf course in the middle of the Potomac to everything that’s happening at the White House. I went for a spring garden tour of a vegetable patch Melania redid, and you could walk up the driveway, right up to the house and the Rose Garden. It was like a crazy theme park with a novelty-sized flagpole and all this gold stuff everywhere.

COLLINS: There’s also that weird new giant statue.

McCREESH: Yes, and construction piles all over the place. It’s like a Trump theme park, but it’s the White House.

COLLINS: The colonnade going into the Rose Garden itself now looks more like the patio at Mar-a-Lago, which, if you’ve covered Trump, will be deeply familiar because he uses it all the time for conversations, lobbying, announcements about hiring and firing. He installed these bronze plaques along the walkway, one for every president, and they’re all captioned with what are essentially Truth Social posts evaluating their performance. Many of them, I was told, he actually wrote himself.

McCREESH: How fast do you think that’s going to snap back depending on who takes over? I think it will all come down.

COLLINS: Except the ballroom. That will likely stay, given how big it’s going to be.

McCREESH: But do you think it’s even going to be done by the time he leaves?

COLLINS: That’s hard to say, but it’s definitely surreal to see all the changes they’re making ahead of the 250th anniversary events this summer—cranes everywhere and banners with his face on them.

McCREESH: I was in a cab going up to Capitol Hill the other day and saw his face looming huge over the Department of Agriculture headquarters. Or maybe it’s the Department of Labor.

COLLINS: And the Justice Department now, too.

McCREESH: This is a man who loves the sight of his own face!

COLLINS: You mentioned Melania Trump earlier. I was in the U.K. watching the British media cover her statement this past April, and it was fascinating because no one had any idea what it was going to be about. When she came out and talked about Jeffrey Epstein, it was a pretty surreal moment, even for the Trump presidency.

McCREESH: It was wild. I was there.

COLLINS: Did you have any idea what she was going to talk about?

McCREESH: No. Her office put out a notice that she was going to make a statement. There was no description, but my editor was like, “Why don’t you just run over there?” I was standing around with the other reporters, all cynically cracking jokes in the driveway, taking bets. Is this going to be about a robot? Is it about Be Best?

COLLINS: You didn’t think it would be newsy though?

McCREESH: No, we definitely didn’t. She came stalking out on these towering stilettos, and the second the word “Epstein” flew out of her mouth, we all just gasped.

COLLINS: How many people were in the room for that?

McCREESH: Maybe 20 in the press corps, and even her husband didn’t know she was going to do that. She’s as opaque as she is campy. She’s also getting blonder.

COLLINS: It came out of nowhere, because we hear from her even less than we did in the first term, which really wasn’t that much.

McCREESH: What fascinated me about it was that she felt the need to restate the story of how she and Trump met, even though they’re 11 years into public life and she’s serving as First Lady for the second time. The fact that she had to come out and actually say, “This monster did not introduce me to my husband” was so fascinating. It shows how much power that story has.

COLLINS: It also shows what covering this White House is really like, and how different it is from any other president, Republican or Democrat. You’d never see a First Lady make news like that. Melania positioned herself right inside one of the biggest scandals of Trump’s second term.

McCREESH: The West Wing was totally caught off guard. Normally, they’re quick to come back with a wild statement or some crack to the press, but they didn’t say a goddamn thing. I do think she has a unique power, because who else but Melania could walk right into a storyline everyone is desperate to get away from, without any consequences? She answers to nobody. It’s kind of amazing, actually.

COLLINS: And no one was really talking about Epstein at that moment. I asked the president why she did it, and he said, “Media coverage,” but it hadn’t been in the news cycle.

McCREESH: I honestly think she just sits up there like Rapunzel in a tower. I think she was scrolling and seeing people talk about her and Epstein and Trump, and finally she was like, “Enough is enough.”

COLLINS: One of your first pieces covering this administration was about Melania not being in Washington that much. Certainly she wasn’t at the time you wrote it.

McCREESH: She’s kind of the Greta Garbo of First Ladies. At the time I wrote that, she had been physically in the White House for something like 14 of the first 108 days, which is amazing. I also thought the movie arc was really interesting, with all that Amazon money. I went to the Kennedy Center for the premiere, which was a deeply strange event.

COLLINS: You were on the red carpet.

McCREESH: It was a strange, ersatz red carpet. They wanted it to feel like Hollywood, but the stars were replaced by cabinet officials and Reuters reporters shouting questions about farm policy and ICE controversies. It was very bizarre.

COLLINS: Right now Melania is at the White House planning next week’s state dinner with King Charles. It reminds me of when we were at Windsor Castle last fall, covering Trump’s U.K. state visit.

McCREESH: That was maybe the coolest moment of the job. We were at Chequers [the prime minister’s estate] and they briefly let us into Windsor Castle to look at the room where the dinner was being held. I remember both of us looking at this crazy long table buttressed by suits of armor, and we both darted around to opposite ends with our notepads to scribble down the seating chart. It was such a fascinating cross-section of tech billionaires and Trump White House officials, interspersed among British royalty.

COLLINS: I think Prince William was next to Melania, and I think Kate was next to Trump.

McCREESH: My main thought was that it must have been everything Trump ever wanted: the most powerful people in the world treating him like a literal king. He could not have designed a better night, but what did he do? He went upstairs, picked up his phone, and started tweeting trash about Jimmy Kimmel. Even on a night when he should have been perfectly sated and had everything his little heart could have ever desired, he was still tweeting.

COLLINS: What’s your schedule like as a White House reporter?

McCREESH: We’re on a team at the Times, and we have something called a duty week. If it’s your duty week, you go to every press conference. You go where he goes. You are fully on him. If he’s tweeting crazy things at midnight, it’s up to you to write about it.

COLLINS: There’s so much color and so many bizarre side stories in this administration, and it’s hard to distinguish yourself in a press corps where everyone’s calling Trump on the phone all day, but I feel like you’ve done that.

McCREESH: Thank you. He is a very colorful president, and there are a million stories falling off the wagon as he’s driving it 100 miles per hour. What do you think about reporters calling Trump all the time? It’s such a crazy situation that the president is so reachable.

COLLINS: I have called Trump on occasion for comment on certain stories. I spoke to him when President Biden dropped out of the race, when the FBI was raiding Mar-a-Lago.

McCREESH: Big, big moments.

COLLINS: When you call him, he does a lot of the talking and then hangs up pretty abruptly.

McCREESH: He loves it.

COLLINS: He does love it, but I don’t know that it always yields a ton of news. He also doesn’t always answer questions on camera because he feels like he’s already spoken to the media.

McCREESH: Does he seem different to you from the last term?

COLLINS: Yes and no, because I think he’s still Trump. You can watch old interviews from the ’80s or ’90s, and he has the same mannerisms, the same positions sometimes, but I think he’s so much more emboldened this time around. Is being in the briefing room what you thought it would be?

McCREESH: This is a really funny new aspect for me because unlike you, I never had an on-camera component of my job.

COLLINS: And you sit right behind me.

McCREESH: Yes. The Times seat is right over your left shoulder. The Daily Mail and The New York Post love it when you and Miss Karoline [Leavitt] are going back and forth, and I always know my little face is going to be in that shot every time. I try to keep it zipped, but it’s kind of hard because it’s pretty interesting.

COLLINS: I worked for a conservative media outlet back in the Sean Spicer days, and I think at first they thought I wouldn’t have any real questions. I feel very strongly that regardless of political views or professional affiliation, a reporter who is given the opportunity to be in the briefing room should be unbiased, ask tough questions, and remember that these people are paid by and work for taxpayers. Epstein was a good example of this. No one cared more about that story than the super right-wing base when this was first unfolding. I can remember when it was all breaking and they shut down the investigation. We went into the cabinet meeting one day—

McCREESH:I remember this day.

COLLINS: And no one asked about it. It was on my list, but Trump stopped calling on me after a few questions. White House officials have made a point that right-wing media outlets should be included in briefings because they reach a different audience and ask questions the mainstream media won’t, but these same outlets were too scared to ask about Epstein for fear of angering officials. It was a major disservice to their audience, who obviously cared deeply about how the administration was handling the investigation.

McCREESH: What’s pernicious about them being in the system is they often crowd out the pool, so entire days go by where if you’re not in there or somebody from The Washington Post or something isn’t there, there won’t be a single tough question. It creates the appearance of access, but it’s just an illusion.

COLLINS: You had a moment recently where you really pressed Trump about bombing the school in Iran, and it was so effective because you didn’t just ask it once, you asked it multiple times. That often works well with him.

McCREESH: I noticed that a lot of the commentary online about it was, “He wouldn’t have responded the way he did if Kaitlan Collins or another woman asked this question.” I do think Trump is an equal opportunity sniper in how he insults people online, but I also think people have really noticed the way he’s been answering women reporters.

COLLINS: Well, first off, that question was such an important one. Initial United States intelligence showed a girls’ school near a military base had been hit. I talked to Beth Sanner, the former deputy director of National Intelligence, and she said it was bad intelligence, that they hadn’t updated their graphs and they didn’t realize that it was a school. We geolocated it, we analyzed it, and we reported that it looked like it was a U.S. Tomahawk missile. We had not said it definitively, but then the president came out and responded to you, “It was Iran.”

McCREESH: I was stunned. As he said it, I looked over his shoulder at Pete Hegseth’s face and said, “Is that true, Mr. Hegseth?” but he would not repeat it. It was this sort of Lord Copper moment.

COLLINS: And then you asked the same question again at Mar-a-Lago?

McCREESH: Yes. That was like the roundhouse kick, but I couldn’t believe he was floating this to see if he could get away with it.

COLLINS: The way you asked it really caught him off guard. I think your tone was great because you were being very calm and collected about it, but also persistent and pushing.

McCREESH: Can we go back to the issue with women reporters?

COLLINS: Well, I don’t think the president likes tough questions from anyone, and he’s threatened a lot of our colleagues who are men, like Jonathan Karl and Peter Alexander. But I do think that this term, people have started to notice the difference in his reaction when women like Mary Bruce or Nancy Cordes are doing the questioning.

McCREESH: I was standing near Nancy Cordes at Mar-a-Lago on Thanksgiving when he turned on her and asked, “Are you a stupid person?”

COLLINS: Or Catherine Lucey, who he called “Miss Piggy” on Air Force One. All of them are excellent reporters. They don’t need our defense because they know they’re awesome.

McCREESH: They are.

COLLINS: When I asked him about Epstein in the Oval Office, he said, “In the 10 years you’ve covered me, I’ve never seen you smile.” He was surrounded by lawmakers and was showing off all these new hats he had on his desk, and I was thinking about what questions I wanted to ask regarding a sex trafficker who ruined the lives of dozens of women.

McCREESH: And he wondered why you weren’t smiling.

COLLINS: I think a lot of people have been frustrated with how his people handled Epstein, and then, to understand that he wasn’t even really listening to the question… I remember looking at the Republican lawmakers who were in the room standing behind him and thinking—

McCREESH: “They know this is whack.” Do you think he was upset because you didn’t like his hats?

COLLINS: I don’t know. But I do think he’s very much someone who is one way in front of the cameras and another when he’s off the record. He has always played the media game. He used to impersonate someone and call in and speak positively about himself. I think his base doesn’t always realize he seeks validation from the same mainstream media they all trash.

McCREESH: When he came back in the second term and he was bigger than ever, he seemed a little bit less concerned with the media than in the first term. But now the rubber’s really hitting the road with the Iran war and his Truth Socials about the media are going nuts. He’s tweeting about individual editorials.

COLLINS: Look at who he’s calling about the war. He’s calling mainstream reporters.

McCREESH: Do you think he’s back to his old insecurities about the coverage?

COLLINS: I think he’s always felt the same about coverage, and I think there’s a reason he calls reporters or answers their calls. He really believes he’s his own best spokesperson. The other day he joked—and I say joked because he kind of laughed, but I’m still not sure—about why he gets such bad press coverage. He said, “Maybe it’s because of my people.” Every press secretary he’s ever had, from Kayleigh McEnany and Sarah [Huckabee] Sanders to Sean Spicer and Stephanie Grisham, has dealt with this. There is always the risk he’ll say something that undermines what they’ve said.

McCREESH: Don’t you think Leavitt’s relationship with him is different because she was in the trenches with him when he was regenerating

COLLINS: I think she is one of the most in line with him in terms of being able to understand and discern his positions.

McCREESH: Everywhere I go, people ask me what she’s really like. What do you think of her?

COLLINS: I’ve had a pretty similar relationship with all Trump’s press secretaries, and I think it’s because he doesn’t like my questions in the briefing room. I don’t think it’s a personal reflection.

McCREESH: You’re damn good at your job.

COLLINS: My job is to ask questions in the briefing room, and I’m not going to take it easy on anyone. That’s what press secretaries sign up for, taking tough questions.

McCREESH: What’s the craziest moment you’ve had covering this political movement?

COLLINS: There’s so many. I was at the White House late the night Trump was diagnosed with COVID. He’d taken a test and he called into Sean Hannity, saying he was waiting for his results. We were like, “There’s no way they haven’t gotten the results yet. It’s the president of the United States.” That moment between waiting to know what was happening and him going to Walter Reed [National Military Medical Center] and being incredibly sick—way sicker than we knew—was surreal, because we genuinely weren’t sure what was going to happen.

McCREESH: That was nuts.

COLLINS: What’s your craziest moment covering him?

McCREESH: I have three. Number one, I was on the front steps of the Capitol on January 6, talking to someone who was erecting a noose for Mike Pence. When I turned around, I ran into a woman from my hometown in Pennsylvania who was there to storm the Capitol. I also remember, after George Floyd, all the protests out front of the White House.

COLLINS: When Trump crossed with the Bible and stood out in front of the church?

McCREESH: Yep. I remember standing in front of St. John’s Church when it caught fire outside the White House, and all the tear gas started coming over the fence.

COLLINS: We were reporting from a nearby building overlooking the White House, and we watched Trump and Bill Barr, and Chairman [Mark] Milley, and Ivanka—

McCREESH: Ivanka and her Max Mara purse.

COLLINS: They were striding across the front lawn of the White House, something they’d never done. You never see people from inside the White House out in front of the White House. It’s just Secret Service. It was such a bizarre moment. What’s your third?

McCREESH: I wasn’t at Butler [Pennsylvania] for the shooting, but I was at the rally when he made his triumphant return, about a month before the election. I’ve never experienced anything like that; it was like a mass religious event. Trump Force One flew low, and people were dropping to the ground and throwing their arms in the sky, crying. And there were all these paintings of his face and blood and the archangel. It was such a different Trump rally from any I’d been to, before or since. That was deeply, deeply American, and religious, and strange, and dark. And it was also the first time Elon was onstage with him, and AC/DC was blaring, and people were jumping out of planes. There were monster trucks everywhere. It was nuts.

COLLINS: We should have known then he was going to win the election.

McCREESH: I knew then.

COLLINS: Washington itself is different this time around.

McCREESH: I remember the first time it felt like the town was holding its nose and thinking it could wait out these brigands. There were a few figures like Kellyanne [Conway] who would wade into the social scene and whatever, but for the most part, everybody just thought it was an aberration. This time, they don’t really care what the town thinks because they have their own counter-establishment. They’ve got their own clubs to hang out in. They’ve got their own dive bar. They’ve got the Mar-a-Lago scene. They’ve got their own version of media elites. Before, it was just Trump and his kids and whatever crazy person happened to attach himself to his campaign.

COLLINS: I’ve lived in Washington since I was 22. I love the city. I learned so much being here, and it’s fascinating to see the people you cover out at restaurants or walking down the street. In term one, you never saw Trump people out because they had the Trump Hotel. Now that it’s a Waldorf Astoria, they’ve been dispersed throughout the city.

McCREESH: Washington’s a weird town.

COLLINS: But if you’re a political junkie—

McCREESH: Yeah, it’s all here.

COLLINS: Any predictions for the future of our coverage, of what it’s going to look like? If you look back at Trump round one, the first year and a half was like nothing.

McCREESH: I have a few ideas about how this movie might end, but I’m loath to make predictions. What do you think?

COLLINS: I’m interested to see what happens during the midterm elections. Trump is very aware of what it’s like to have a Democratic majority that’s happy to impeach him and make his life hell and drag cabinet secretaries up for hearings.

McCREESH: I was on Capitol Hill the other day and all these reporters were up there to renew their Hill passes for the year, and people were saying, “We’re entering subpoena season.” If everything flips over, the action’s going to move to the Hill, and the whole center of gravity in the town shifts.

COLLINS: And no one knows that better than President Trump.

McCREESH: Thank you, Kaitlan.

COLLINS: Thanks, Shawn.

McCREESH: Bye, Interview.

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Groomer: Melissa Dezarate using Kevin Murphy at A-Frame Agency.

Production Direction: Alexandra Weiss.

Photography Production: Georgia Ford.

Location: Elio’s.

Special Thanks: Giovanni Bertagnoli and Luca Guaitolini.