Kaitlan Collins, in a white suit, takes on Trump

She knew what lay ahead: the talk about her, the roar, the alternate version of history, the controversy. She was prepared as best she could. And she was dressed for the arena.

When Kaitlan Collins interviewed Donald J. Trump in his first appearance on CNN since 2016, when he moderated Republican city hall on Wednesday, she did so in a pristine white pantsuit, instantly joining a long line of women standing face to face with the former president in that symbolic armor.

Indeed, when Mr. Trump sat on stage at Saint Anselm College in his white shirt and bright red tie, his signature navy one-button suit pulled down the middle and an American flag pin on his lapel, and Mrs. Collins sat across from him in her white suit and black shell top, the stark image presented its own semiological roadmap and moment of déjà vu.

Since Ms. Collins is both a former White House correspondent and co-host of a morning show, where what you look like and what colors you wear are actually part of the job, there’s no doubt she understood the gist of what she was about to doing was. Or put on.

In Washington, after all, since Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, the white trouser suit, with its roots in the suffragist tradition, its associations with women’s rights and women’s suffrage, has practically become a ceremonial public expression of female power.

Groups of women wore it to the polls in 2016. The women of the House wore it for the State of the Union in 2019. Kamala Harris wore it when she made her first official appearance as vice president-elect in 2020. Nancy Pelosi wore it to announce that the House would begin the impeachment trial of Mr. Trump in 2019 and to announce that she would not stand for re-election as speaker in 2022. And, as anyone who’s followed Ms. Pelosi’s career knows, she’s a masterful color tactician, choosing a flaming orange jacket to confront President Trump and a fuchsia dress to pose among a sea of ​​dark suits as she took the gavel back.

Even Melania Trump wore a white pantsuit when she first appeared in public after the Stormy Daniels scandal at the State of Union in 2018. (And if you think that choice was a coincidence, one of her advisers confirmed to me that it wasn’t. so it was.) It has become so ubiquitous a statement so quickly, so embedded in our visual library, that it’s almost a cliché.

That is the power of the instantly recognizable symbol. It’s almost impossible now to see a woman in a white pantsuit at a large public venue and not think, Ah! Alignment with history.

In it, it was also an implicit underline of the statement Ms Collins made at the beginning of the town hall, that no deal had been made with the candidate to encourage him to appear, and that no guidelines had been agreed. It separated her from her subject from the start.

Not that the lawsuit or any of Ms. Collins’ actual statements — the repeated attempts to get Mr. Trump to answer important questions about Ukraine and abortion, to correct his falsehoods about the 2020 election, to fact-check — were powerful enough to to stop the Trump steamroller (or to stop CNN’s criticism for hosting the event).

Considering Ms. Collins was rumored to be lining up for the evening anchorage on CNN, putting her in a position to cover the next election cycle, it may also have been a foreshadowing of things to come.