It’s not often a press secretary is so rabidly enthusiastic about their mission that they develop their own following, but then Karoline Leavitt is exceptional.
Her articulate, smug and often combative responses to media questions are so cooly delivered, they regularly draw praise from U.S. President Donald Trump himself, who — in naming her White House spokesperson for his second term in 2025 — made her, at 27, the youngest person ever to hold the position.
“That face … and those lips,” Trump has said, “they move like a machine gun.”
Evan Vucci / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during a briefing at the White House.
In February, after a racist animation was posted to Trump’s Truth Social account depicting former U.S. president Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as apes, Leavitt’s response was: get over it.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King,” she said in a statement. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”
When it turned out that act of disrespect and bigotry did actually matter to many Americans — including some Republicans — the White House blamed the video’s release on some unnamed and presumably inattentive staffer, with Trump saying he hadn’t personally watched the whole thing before passing it along to be posted.
Days later, when a reporter asked Leavitt whether a different social media post by Trump on geopolitics was contrary to a stated policy position of his administration, Leavitt contradicted the White House’s earlier messaging about who’s responsible for the president’s social media posts without batting an eye.
“The post should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration,” she said firmly and with a smile. “It’s coming straight from the horse’s mouth. When you see it on Truth Social, you know it’s directly from president Trump.”
And then, just as she did back in November after Trump had called Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey “piggy,” Leavitt not only acknowledged the president’s reactionary and off-the-cuff behaviour — which is often reflected in the noxious content he posts on social media at all hours of the night — but tried to spin it into a positive.
“That’s the beauty of this president and his transparency in relaying this administration’s policies to all of you and to the rest of the world,” she said, with the aplomb that seems to come so easily to her.
She reminds me, often, of the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, who — when Alice remarks she has a hard time believing in impossible things — replies, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice … Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
So just who is Karoline Leavitt, this consummate twister of truths and purveyor of propaganda administered with such a broad brush as to put George Orwell’s cunning porcine proselytizer Squealer in Animal Farm to shame?
According to online bios, she is now 28, attended a private Catholic School in Massachusetts and holds a BA in politics and communication from Saint Anselm College, a private Catholic institution. Fine credentials, to be sure, but certainly nothing that would explain how scarily self-possessed she is at her job.
Here is a press secretary who embraces her mandate so wholly, and the MAGA philosophy seemingly so completely, that she can stand in front of a group of seasoned reporters and repeat Trump’s disparagements of a former president with all the ease of someone reading The Cat in the Hat to their child for the hundredth time.
In March, when addressing Operation Epic Fury — the White House’s self-righteously named military operation otherwise known as war against Iran — Leavitt discussed a social media post by Trump criticizing weapons transfers to Ukraine under former president Joe Biden.
“The president, in that post, was pointing out that, unfortunately, we had a very stupid and incompetent leader in this White House for four years who gave away many of our best weapons — for nothing, for free — to another country very far away by the name of Ukraine,” Leavitt said, while emphasizing the undiminished “strength and might” of the American military.
If it seems un-statesperson-like for a press secretary to speak of a former American patriot in such derogatory tones, we need only remind ourselves that her boss is no statesman and she likely takes her cues from him.
Still, there’s something chillingly unsettling about the relish and defiance with which Leavitt tackles her messaging. You can’t help but wonder, is there anything she wouldn’t be willing to say? Any act so reprehensible, she could not defend it?
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Listening to Leavitt, I can’t help but think that it’s one thing to drink the Kool-Aid — it’s quite another to mix the concoction yourself and down the whole jug.
Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s.
X: @Pam_Frampton
Bluesky: @pamframpton.bsky.social
Pam Frampton
Pam Frampton is a columnist for the Free Press. She has worked in print media since 1990 and has been offering up her opinions for more than 20 years. Read more about Pam.
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