Karoline Leavitt brutally shuts down CNN s Kaitlan Collins during heated clash

XF was complaining that it was front page news about these six servicemembers who were killed. That's not what the secretary said, Caitlin, and that's not what the secretary meant, and you know it. You know you're being disingenuous. There is not—we've never had a secretary of defense. Who cares more— These are all huge holes to get through where tragic things happen. It's front page news. I get it. The press only wants to make the president look bad. As you know, we cover the debts of U.S. servicemembers under every president. The press does only want to make the president look bad. That's a fact. Listen to me. Especially you and especially CNN. And the secretary of defense cares deeply about our warfighters and our men and women in uniform. He travels all across this country to meet with them, to connect with them, and your network has hardly ever probably reported on that. Our favorite time of the week to talk to our favorite person in the world, Megyn Kelly. There is so much happening. Thank you for giving us a bit of your time because, wow, 10 minutes after this conversation, something completely different will happen. But here we go again. I noticed on your show today you were pointing to very patchy public support for what is happening right now in Iran. We all know why. It's good to get rid of the Ayatollah. We all know why. They're an awful regime. But give us an idea about public support about the war now that it's on. Well, it's most partisan groups have retreated to their party lines. Republicans support the president and his efforts in Iran. Democrats don't. But the independents who are up for grabs are overwhelmingly against this. And even within the Republican Party, you know, you've got a hefty amount who say they're against it. It depends on the poll, but it could be in a place from 30 percent around there. So the majority of every poll is against it. The only way you can get people to say like on a majority basis that they're even close to like maybe for it is if you say, are you in support of a military action to take out Iran's nuclear program? And, you know, by the way, we did that in June. So like, OK. But, yeah, people, they don't understand the war. Like the polling also shows no one has any idea what we're doing. Like, do you? They specifically went through and asked, do you think it's for regime change? Like 12 percent? Yes. Do you think it's to take out the new program? 13 percent? Yes. Do you think it's because Iran was going to launch terrorist attacks? You know, 10 percent? Yes. Nothing got more than like 13 or 14 percent at the most. And multiple answers, seven or eight or nine were on there with at least seven, eight or nine percent percent in terms of support. So nobody knows what we're doing there, Paul. And that's because the administration has given us about 10,000 different explanations from the morning. Trump spoke about this on Saturday to the afternoon that day and then again yesterday and then Marco Rubio yesterday. Then Marco trying to do cleanup in aisle seven today. Now they're trying to shame the media after saying this is a media messaging problem. No, it's not. It's the administration messaging problem. Yeah. I mean, there's also a lot of people that were paying attention to to J.D. Vance and the fact that for the first couple of days he was relatively quiet. He has come out and since done interviews where unsurprisingly he's backing everything that the administration is doing again. Is somebody trying to work out? Obviously, the president is the one making the decisions, but who is the one who is informing those decisions? Who are you looking to for who has the presidency at the moment that is either reaffirming his choices or spurning him on? Well, that would be our secret president, Benjamin Netanyahu. Like there's no one influencing Trump more right now than Netanyahu. That's just the case within the administration. Look, I think they're all supporting him. The reports are that he had an all hands on deck meeting mid-January. Vance was there. Rubio was there. Dean Dan Raisinkane, our chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was there. And they they had a long, you know, long heart to heart about what we should do. And that J.D. Vance was against strikes, but said, if you're going to do them, this is how I think you should do them. Like going strong and sweeping as opposed to like an incremental approach, which I guess Trump had originally been leaning towards something smaller and more pinpoint. And it looks like J.D. got his way. And now we're you know, we're in it. And I guess I don't know. It's it's it's going to be very hard over the coming days to watch the casualty reports come in. We've already lost six U.S. military service personnel. And it's a tragedy because their parents, I'm sure, were extremely proud of them when they signed up. I'm sure they love America and they did it because they love their country. And I'll bet they always thought that, God forbid, they had to pay the ultimate sacrifice. It would be for a war in which they were clearly fighting for America's interests. And we remain to figure out exactly how that was the case here. I mean, I said on Monday, I definitely see how this is in Iran's interest, like the interest of the people of Iran, though it's a little precarious because we don't know who the Ayatollah is going to get replaced by right now. It looks like his son, who might be even more hardline than the father. I definitely see how it's good for Israel. This is Netanyahu's dream. I'm not sure how it's good for America. I mean, Iran's terrible. We know that the leadership they've hated America and they've definitely attacked U.S. troops, hundreds of them, over 600 of them in Iraq alone. Never mind what's happened on the high seas with the Houthis. But we have done retaliatory actions in response to those behaviors. You know, we have imposed sanctions on Iran. We've done strikes on some of their outposts and their third parties that they use. And to pretend that none of that has been addressed now, and that it all comes down to this one big act of revenge where we take over their country, we take out all their leadership, we impose regime change, we impose democracy. No one's used that word in fairness to the administration. We get boots on the ground for months or who knows how long. It's just that doesn't make sense. And Trump knew it wouldn't make sense. And that's why when he first came out and sold this, he said imminent threat. And then it promptly hit every paper from people who are in the know that there was no imminent threat. And in fact, that was made specifically clear that there would not be an imminent threat that Iran could oppose to the United States of any kind. And that the only threat we might face from them would probably take about 10 years for them to either reconstruct their nukes or get some sort of a meaningful intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach here. But we were nowhere near there. And I understand the argument. Why wait for it to be imminent? OK, you can't just go around preemptively bombing any country that doesn't like you and has like the desire to make a bomb that could take you out like that. We have to get we have to bomb North Korea next because they actually have the bomb and they hate us. Let's bomb the Chinese because they actually could engage with us militarily. And it's just like this is not a foreign policy that makes sense. And it's not one Trump ran on. And it is in many ways a betrayal of his campaign promises, what he sold himself as and of his MAGA base.