U.S. President Donald Trump doses off while listening to attendees' remarks at the White House. (Reuters)
CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins may have harbored some hard feelings over President Donald Trump’s Thursday attack on Reuters reporter Jacob Bogage, if a brutal Thursday night supercut was any indication.
Trump lit into Bogage after the reporter asked if he was canceling a campaign rally in Kansas for Republican Sen. Roger Marshall due to being tired of traveling. Trump snapped: "Oh, you're sick to ask that question. You are sick."
He then continued to insult Bogage, calling him "disgusting" and "way out of shape."
"You've been following me for two weeks. I feel perfect. You are disgusting. Put yourself in shape. You look like hell," Trump barked before storming off.
“Now, that reporter from Reuters … asked a straightforward question about the president's schedule, and he got an irritated answer, as you heard there, especially given it's the president himself who has touted his own ability to maintain a busy schedule,” said Collins, before rolling out the supercut.
“It is so — the one thing I can say is that no president has ever worked so hard on a midterm,” said Trump at a recent rally in South Carolina.
“Nobody's ever campaigned like I have for midterms,” insisted Trump at a Monday rally in Mississippi.
“I've been doing this stuff for a week and a half, two weeks,” said Trump at a Tuesday presentation in Lubbock, Texas. “I did more rallies than I've ever done for myself.”
“You know, I've done 26 of them now,” Trump boasted in Corpus Christi, Texas on Tuesday.
“I have worked very hard,” Trump told Fox News in a recent interview. “I've done 14 rallies in nine days. And that's a lot.”
“I'm going to Georgia, but, uh, it's a strain on your voice,” Trump said Saturday in Palm Beach Florida. “It's a strain, you know. It's not normal.”
“I'm doing something different,” Trump said in October. “I'm working like a dog.”
But there's another reason why canceling these final two rallies of the 2026 midterms stands out, said Collins — especially considering in the final 72 hours before the 2018 midterms Trump held back-to-back rallies in Montana, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri. Back then Trump told his team he wanted to be on the road as much as possible in those final few days as voters were casting their ballots to help Republicans.
“Tonight, sources say, though, that some Republican officials are relieved by the president's decision to cancel those final two rallies,” said Collins. “One top Republican official told my colleague, Jeff Zeleny, ‘thank God he hasn't moved the needle anywhere,’ and a second official assuring ‘everyone who has seen the president who wants to see him.’”
Even Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, who the president was expected to go and rally on his behalf, appeared indifferent to Trump’s canceled plans, saying “I think that my doing so well in the polls that he's got probably got better places to spend his time.”
“Now, we don't have insight into the senator's polling, but a brand-new CNN poll actually found that Marshall's race is still very close,” quipped Collins, pointing to a survey showing Democrat Adam Hamilton outpacing Marshall by four points, at 49 percent to 45 percent.
“If there's been a surge in [Marshall’s] numbers, we have not seen it materialize yet in the polling,” Collins assured.