At 27, Karoline Leavitt is the youngest White House press secretary since disgraced former President Richard Nixon picked 29-year-old Ronald Ziegler for the same position in 1969 (and the parallels are not lost on us).
Leavitt hit the MAGA-atmosphere during the first Trump administration, where she worked as an assistant press secretary before leaving to become New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s communications director.
In the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Leavitt made two social media posts that she has since erased: one that called the officer who tricked insurrectionists into going the wrong way, “A hero,” and another describing the insurrection as, “a dark day in the history of the United States Capitol.”
Like her previous boss Stefanik, Leavitt has been willing to debase herself and pretend any pretense of a conviction she might have had about justice and our constitution was no match for a position in President Donald Trump’s orbit.
A few months after Jan. 6, she was fully on board and promoting debunked election fraud claims on social media.
In 2022, she ran unsuccessfully for a congressional seat in the First District of New Hampshire before folding herself back into Trump’s 2024 campaign for president.
In the run-up to the election, Leavitt showed an almost unhinged ability to spin for Trump, unabashedly calling the Trump campaign “disciplined” after every disastrous press conference Trump gave.
In August, she denied that Trump’s campaign had any connections to Project 2025. She was featured in a Project 2025 training video “The Art of Professionalism.”
While Trump and others repeatedly promoted lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and elsewhere in 2024, Leavitt showed the kind of shamelessness Trump desires in a mouthpiece. During an appearance on CNN, Leavitt's lies and inability to answer simple fact-checking questions ended with the interview being cut short.
Since the election, and Trump’s announcement that Leavitt would be the next White House press secretary, Leavitt has continued her monomaniacal vigilance to create an alternative reality for her narcissist in chief. After Trump pardoned more than 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists, including seditious conspirators, Leavitt tried to downplay the negative response.
“I don't think it's causing much controversy,” she told Fox News. “President Trump is restoring faith in our justice system,” she added.
A recent investigation from NOTUS
shows that about a week ago, Leavitt “amended” campaign filings from
her failed 2022 congressional run. It reportedly shows that she failed
to disclose, for years, at least $200,000 in
“inappropriate donations.” It also shows that she still owes more than
$300,000 in unpaid debts. Only the best conartists people.
Leavitt will now join the ranks of other Trump press secretaries. That clowncar includes waste-of-space Sean Spicer, fancy-podium-hoarder Sarah Huckabee Sanders, afraid-of-the-press Stephanie Grisham, and world’s-worst-prognosticator (but another babe) Kayleigh McEnany.
Leavitt seems a perfect fit for Trump, as her first press conference Tuesday clearly demonstrated. She even promised to never, ever lie.
DAILY KOS UPDATE BY OLIVER WILLIS
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt used her first media briefing to promote a lie about U.S. foreign aid spending.
The falsehood came as Leavitt attempted to justify the widely decried and possibly illegal federal spending freeze ordered by President Donald Trump via the Office of Management and Budget.
“DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” she claimed.
Trump megadonor and Department of Government Efficiency Chair Elon Musk amplified the made-up story on his X account.
“Tip of iceberg,” Musk wrote, later adding, “My guess is that a lot of that money ended up in the pockets [of] Hamas, not actually condoms.”
The attempted attack on the Biden administration is a complete lie. In September, the U.S. Agency for International Development released a report on government spending on contraception and condom shipments made over the last year. None of the $60.8 million was sent to Gaza or anywhere else in the Middle East.
Despite Leavitt’s attempt to scandalize President Joe Biden’s foreign aid spending on contraception, he wasn’t the only one to do it. During his first term in 2019, Trump spent about $40 million on contraceptive aids as part of international relief expenditures.
The aid package authorized by Biden in September was not nearly as salacious as Leavitt’s rhetoric would indicate. According to USAID, that disbursement to Gaza paid for food assistance, nutrition, emergency health care, access to safe drinking water, and emergency shelters, among other items.
But despite the lie—and Leavitt’s inability to inform the public about how vital services like Medicaid would be affected by the spending freeze—corporate media outlets like The New York Times claimed she had made a “steely and unflinching debut” in her new role.
“In First White House Briefing, Youngest Press Secretary Ever Eschews Tradition,” a Wall Street Journal headline similarly gushed.
Leavitt opened her briefing by committing to “telling the truth from this podium every single day.”
But then, of course, she went on to lie.
Considering the track record of Trump’s former press secretaries—Sean Spicer, Sarah Sanders, and Kayleigh McEnany—there will surely be many more lies to come.
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