Take It or Leavitt

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Some days ago, before stepping into the White House briefing room, Karoline Leavitt took a few moments to pray. “Lord Jesus, please give us the strength, the knowledge, the ability to articulate our words,” she said. Leavitt—who, at twenty-seven, is the youngest person to hold the position of press secretary—wore a short-sleeve gray Chanel-inspired dress, and held a stack of papers. She is Catholic. She looked happy, as she always does, fresh and relaxed. But inside the briefing room, the mood was entirely different. 

“Everything is so surreal,” a White House correspondent told me. (Almost everyone I spoke with insisted on anonymity, for fear of being shut out, and a few sent me anxious follow-up messages, underlining the potential risk to their work.) “She is abrasive, says absurd things,” and, when it comes to MAGA, “really believes in the cause.” Leavitt has barred the Associated Press—over its unwillingness to call the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America”—and, some days, denies access to wire services. There is little communication about how briefing-room admission decisions are made. In place of legitimate reporters, Leavitt has invited newcomers who transform the press pool into a casting call for a Trump-era Miss USA. “It’s a tough pill for a lot of journalists like myself,” Emily Jashinsky—the DC correspondent for UnHerd, an outlet based in the United Kingdom, and a former editor for The Federalist—told me. New media, in her view, should be welcome, but they have to scrutinize the White House “without fear or favor.”

“Many of them are activists, they’re not journalists,” a correspondent said. Recently, one complimented Leavitt on her looks; another praised Trump for bringing peace to the world. Tim Pool, the MAGA influencer, showed up. “Some ask questions almost like they want to be noticed by Donald Trump in order to get a job in the administration,” the correspondent observed. Reporters in the room hardly know how to react. “Often, we look at each other, rolling our eyes or just laughing, because it’s so incredible that this is going on.” But also: “People are thinking more about how to ask questions without being too aggressive, because this administration can really keep you out of the White House.”

Those familiar with press-briefing dynamics don’t like Leavitt. Nonpartisan reporters have said that her tenure marks a distinct shift from the past: a new tone, a new era, one with troubling implications. She often speaks without notes, and frequently sparks outrage—not just from the left, but from traditional conservatives as well. Reporters say that she has been somewhat accessible by text (her assistant didn’t answer me) and is friendly toward those she sees as aligned with MAGA interests while remaining openly disdainful of journalists she views as adversarial.

Rarely a day goes by without a viral sound bite. When asked whether deportees are entitled to due process, Leavitt dismissed the premise, saying that it was “not quite true,” and noted that the administration was exploring “legal pathways” to remove US citizens. Commenting on the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland father who was wrongly deported, she noted with chilling detachment: “Based on the sensationalism of many of the people in this room, you would think we deported a candidate for Father of the Year.”

Pablo Manríquez—the editor of Migrant Insider, an outlet launched last October that didn’t receive press credentials under the Joe Biden administration but was accredited in the first weeks of Trump’s second term—observed that Leavitt’s tenure has “fractured the press corps in a profound way,” taking advantage of existing disunity. “The reason everybody is so afraid is because there is no solidarity,” he said. “As soon as they took AP out of the Oval Office, there should have been an uprising.” Even so, he noted, “Karoline Leavitt is a pretty standard press secretary at the White House.” She’s conducting a performance, and “she sticks to her talking points.”

Leavitt has no problem lying—perhaps not a political oddity, though, in February, when she seized control of the briefing room from the White House Correspondents’ Association, which for years had set the terms of admission, she took advantage of a weaker press pool, with fewer challengers in her midst. “The changes to the press pool today show that the White House is just using a new means to do the same thing: retaliate against news organizations for coverage the White House doesn’t like,” the WHCA wrote in a statement on April 15. “Restrictions on White House media coverage only hurt the American people who rely on unfiltered journalism to stay informed and make decisions critical to their lives.”

Leavitt stands behind a podium that, since 2017, has been occupied exclusively by women: most recently Karine Jean-Pierre and Jen Psaki, and before them, during Trump’s first term, Kayleigh McEnany, Stephanie Grisham, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator,” Trump said in announcing her appointment. “I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American people as we Make America Great Again.”

Earlier in her life, she dabbled in journalism. Leavitt, a New Hampshire native and softball player at Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, interned at a radio station, WMUR. She was on the staff of the Saint Anselm Crier, the student newspaper, where she touted her adoration of Trump. The Muslim ban was a move made “for America’s own benefit,” she wrote in February of 2017. “I understand that it is truly unfair to all of the innocent people in these corrupt nations who want to come here to live a safe life. But so do Americans, whose home this already is.” In a letter to the editor that September, she expressed frustration to Crier readers about the marginalization of conservative students and the dominance of liberal perspectives on campus: “In one instance last spring, the professor opened class by stating that [he or she] did not vote for President Trump, because they think he is a ‘maniac, goofball.’ How is that relevant at all to the class discussion? What could that professor possibly have gained from stating that to the class?” The letter was signed, “A fed-up Republican student.” At some point, as Politico reported recently, she grew frustrated with the Crier, and started her own television show.

Her junior year, she was a White House intern. After graduating, in 2019, she landed a full-time role as an assistant press secretary. Following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, she became communications director for Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman from New York. In 2022, Leavitt won the GOP primary for a House seat but lost in the general election (and generated a reported $325,000 in campaign debt). Over the next two years, she was an instructor for a Project 2025 “Presidential Administration Academy Certificate Program” and worked as a spokesperson for a pro-Trump super-PAC, MAGA Inc. She became spokesperson for Trump’s campaign in January of 2024. 

She is married to Nicholas Riccio, a real-estate developer thirty-two years her senior, whom she met during her failed congressional campaign, in 2022. “I mean, it’s a very atypical love story, but he’s incredible,” she told Megyn Kelly. “He’s very supportive of me building my success and my career.” Her Instagram feed is filled with snapshots of her life: her husband, her baby, vacations, swimsuits, meetings, and whispers into Trump’s ear. After January 6, 2021, when many Trump loyalists distanced themselves from him, Leavitt drew closer. (A correspondent told me that Leavitt was known to be among those who convened with him in the immediate aftermath.) “That is the reason,” a correspondent said, for Leavitt getting the press secretary gig: “Loyalty when everybody fled.” Steven Cheung, Trump’s communications director, calls the shots, I was told, and Leavitt follows. “His approach is aggressive, and Karoline executes on his plans,” a correspondent who has known Leavitt since the first administration said. As one reporter put it, “She was the right choice for what they wanted to do.”

Now, as Leavitt designates briefing-room seats to “well-deserving outlets who have never been allowed to share in this awesome responsibility,” solidarity among the press pool seems to be disintegrating, and she is exploiting the divisions, performing for an audience of one. “She gives these briefings and is clearly talking to Trump,” a correspondent said. “He’s watching, he’s sending notes. She sometimes reads her phone and delivers his message. This is prime time for him, and he’s very happy with her.”

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