How Karoline Leavitt became Donald Trump’s secret weapon

In the Oval Office with the president, March 31

ALEXANDER DRAGO/EPA

“Excuse me, the secretary is obviously a very busy man,” she says. “I’d just like to end with this.” She raises her hands, the way Trump does, as if to hold a piece of air in front of her. “For decades, Republicans and Democrats have said that these unfair trade practices are ripping off the American people,” she says. “We finally have a president here at the White House who is playing the long game.”

Leavitt, 27, is the face of the Trump White House. It’s extraordinary, really. She barely remembers 9/11. Yet here she is, telling us all what to think about trade and foreign affairs and the duty of judges, whatever you might have heard from constitutional scholars, to stop blocking the orders of the president.

She looks like a cheerleader, even when she is busy describing, in laborious detail, the terrible crimes of illegal immigrants now being deported to a terrifying prison in El Salvador by the heroic agents of the immigration and customs enforcement agency.

“An illegal alien who was released by the Biden administration into our country was just arrested in Georgia,” she said the other day. “The suspect has now been indicted on charges of malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault, rape, aggravated sexual battery, and necrophilia.”

She paused here, like a primary school teacher before some irregular verbs. “For those who don’t know, necrophilia is a sexual obsession with corpse,” she said. Then she moved on to the economy.

Questions that would leave most of us quivering like a jelly, she answers without a pause. Would you like to respond to the Chinese military drills around Taiwan, someone asked her the other day.

“Yes, I would,” she replied. “The National Security Council briefed me on this this morning, and they said that the president is emphasising the importance of maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait, encouraging the peaceful resolution of these cross-strait issues, reiterating our opposition to any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion.”

• Welcome to Magaland: a night on the town in Trump’s new Washington

Then she added, looking rather pleased with herself, “That is directly from the national security adviser just for you, Steve Holland of Reuters.”

Never has Trump had a smoother spokeswoman. You always have the impression that she has just spoken with him, moments ago, and will be back at his side in a moment, once she has finished with all these losers. Take the press conference she hosted at the end of March. By most reckonings, it should have been the most difficult so far.

“Karoline?” says Peter Alexander, of NBC News. He is one of her chief antagonists. He is in the front row, a sturdy figure in a dark suit with thick, greying hair. “Has the president been briefed and physically seen… all the details of the chat as printed by The Atlantic [magazine]?”

“I just spoke to the president about it, yes,” she replies.

Leavitt’s debut press briefing, January 28

GETTY IMAGES

As you may have heard, the magazine’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally included in a group chat in which members of Trump’s cabinet decided to launch strikes on Yemen. Then the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was once in the National Guard and then became a Fox News presenter, started telling everyone how it would go down. He talked about the launch of F-18s and Tomahawks and the timing of the “strike window”, like a best man texting his buddies about the schedule for a stag weekend. “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP),” he said.

At first Goldberg didn’t publish this bit. Then, when the Trump administration insisted that Goldberg was lying, that these were not “war plans” and they were not classified, the magazine printed them.

• How Team Trump handled the Signal crisis — a timeline

In the briefing room, the man from NBC reads out the definition of classified information, from the defence department’s manual. “What is it about what Pete Hegseth wrote that makes you say this is not classified?” he asks.

“Well, it’s not just me saying that, Peter,” she replies. “It’s the secretary of defence himself who was saying this as well. Why did The Atlantic downgrade their allegation?” she asks, speaking for a moment in a higher voice and rocking around behind the podium, as if she was the magazine itself, tottering haplessly along, changing its story. This morning, The Atlantic called them “attack plans” rather than “war plans”. Leavitt seems to regard this as a crippling admission.

One of the toughest jobs in Washington

Being President Trump’s White House press secretary was once considered an impossible job, attempted only by the brave and the foolhardy, in the certain knowledge that you would not last long. Sean Spicer, a genial Republican Party comms guy, was the first to try it in 2017. On his second day in the job, he was sent out to tell the press that the crowd at Trump’s inauguration was larger than Obama’s, and in fact the largest ever, whatever they might have seen with their lying eyes. Things went downhill from there.

Anthony Scaramucci was Trump’s second press secretary during the president’s first term. He lasted just 11 days

AP

He resigned after six months when Trump appointed the financier Anthony Scaramucci, in a separate role, as the White House communications director. “This is obviously a difficult situation to be in,” Scaramucci told reporters, before thanking Spicer for his service. “I love the guy and I wish him well and I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.” The Mooch was charming and it looked as if he might do very well until he called a reporter and began cursing like a sailor, in what he took to be an off-the-record conversation, about other people in the White House. He was fired after 11 days.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Spicer’s deputy, was the frontwoman after that, chiding reporters and glowering at them and steadily holding ever fewer of the so-called “daily press briefings”. She leftto run to be governor of Arkansas in 2019, making way for Kayleigh McEnany, a combative television performer, fierce as a daytime Fox News host. On her first day in the job, she pledged never to lie to the reporters. Some felt she might have broken that rule when she persisted in suggesting that Trump might not have lost the 2020 election. Leavitt was one of her assistants.

Leavitt grew up in the small town of Atkinson, in southern New Hampshire, with two older brothers. Her father, Bob, founded a used car dealership. “He reminds me of President Trump,” she told the New Hampshire Eagle-Tribune in 2020.

As a child, Leavitt wanted to be a television news reporter. She attended a private Catholic school and went to Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, New Hampshire, on a softball scholarship, studying politics and communications and becoming a campus conservative, writing columns for the student paper attacking the liberal media. During the summer of her third year she won an internship at the presidential correspondence office, writing thank-you notes to the public on behalf of the president. She was offered a job there when she graduated, in 2019. The following year she got the job with McEnany, Trump’s press secretary.

After Trump left office, McEnany went to Fox News and Leavitt became the communications director for the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik, and then decided to run for Congress herself, in New Hampshire, in 2022. You have to be 25: she was old enough, but only by a couple of months.

Running for Congress in New Hampshire, October 2022

GETTY IMAGES

The Republican primary had ten candidates; Leavitt won the primary, but then lost in the general vote to a Democrat. She gained a thicker skin, she said later. Also, a husband. One of her campaign events was held at a restaurant owned by Nicholas Riccio, a property developer in his late fifties.

They fell in love. “Was there any, like, ‘I can’t date him, he’s 57?’ ” the broadcaster Megyn Kelly asked in a recent interview. “Yes! Of course! It’s an atypical love story,” Leavitt replied. She describes him as a supportive partner, a man who had already made his fortune and could step back into parenting their infant son, while she went on the road with Trump. Three days after the birth, on her first day home from hospital, Trump was nearly assassinated. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘Looks like I’m going back to work,’” she told The Conservateur website.

‘I speak from my mind and from my heart’

After Trump was elected, Leavitt became the youngest White House press secretary in history. Ahead of her first day in the briefing room, an assistant prepared for her a weighty binder filled with answers on everything that might come up, she said, on The Megyn Kelly Show. “It was too cumbersome for my brain and the way I learn and think and study, to have that,” she said. “I said, I want to just go in there and speak from my mind and from my heart.”

Her debut was on January 28. She came out dressed rather like a bishop, in a crimson blazer and a black shirt, a large gold cross hanging from her neck. A reporter from the Associated Press asked if she thought of her role as “advocating for the president” or providing “the unvarnished truth”.

Leavitt said it was a fact that some legacy media outlets have “pushed” lies about the president. “I vow to provide the truth,” she said. “I expect everyone in this room to do the same.”

Taking questions on February 25

REUTERS

Some of the unvarnished truth she provided that day, such as a claim that the US had spent $50 million (£39 million) to supply Gaza with condoms, did not survive close scrutiny. Occasionally, when challenged, she will pivot, saying it is really up to the reporter to discover whether something is true.

For her part, Leavitt soon claimed that the Associated Press was guilty of spreading “lies”. The agency persisted in calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico and not, as Trump has renamed it, the Gulf of America. For this it had been barred from the press pool that takes turns covering events in the Oval Office. What about free speech, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins asked.

“I was very upfront in my briefing on day one that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable,” Leavitt replied. “And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America.” She genuinely sounded cross about this. She waved her briefing notes in the air. “I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is,” she said.

Trump’s White House is making other changes too, attempting to leaven the mix of newspaper and cable news reporters with podcasters, streamers and anyone making “news-related content”. It plans to start choosing where everyone sits: a power previously held by the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Alongside questions from CNN and NBC, you now regularly hear questions from Brian Glenn of the streaming channel called Real America’s Voice. People often refer to him as the boyfriend of the far right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, not to get in his personal business, but more as a shorthand for his politics. At a recent briefing, his question was all about the great work being done by “the subcommittee headed by chairman Marjorie Taylor Greene” that some people might have missed. Glenn is also the chap who helped to poison the Zelensky-Trump meeting, by asking the Ukrainian president why he wasn’t wearing a suit. He doesn’t throw any hard questions at Leavitt though. “You look great,” he told her. “You’re doing a great job.”

En route to New Jersey with Elon Musk in March

REUTERS

Leavitt told Megyn Kelly that reporters, even from hoary old newspaper and television networks, have given her glowing reviews. “They’ll come in my office every day and they’ll admit that off the record,” she said. “They appreciate the access and the transparency and the preparation that goes into my briefings.”

And perhaps they do. She answers questions, after all, and Trump is constantly going before the cameras too. And there’s so much more to cover.

“She’s a propagandist,” one reporter told me, off the record naturally. “All she does is berate the White House journalists. It’s an abusive relationship.”

Taking the fight to ‘the mainstream media’

She is certainly not afraid to shoot the messenger from time to time. The day The Atlantic magazine publishes the text message war plans, or attack plans, Leavitt begins the briefing with a speech about all the successes of the government. “Unfortunately,” she says, “the mainstream media continues to be focused on a sensationalised story by the failing Atlantic magazine.”

She then proceeds to attack Jeffrey Goldberg, its editor, as a “peddler” of hoaxes and an “anti-Trump hater”. He was once a Middle East correspondent for The New Yorker, where he wrote about claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. By the time Leavitt is finished with him, he is more or less responsible for the war in Iraq. “We can now add this Signal hoax to this very long list,” she says.

Of course, it wasn’t a hoax. All Goldberg had done was sit in a car park one Saturday morning while his phone lit up with texts from Trump’s cabinet.

“So, why aren’t launch times on a mission strike classified?” asks Jacqui Heinrich of Fox News.

Leavitt says they are not because the defence secretary had said they were not. “Do you trust the secretary of defence, who was nominated for this role, voted by the United States Senate into this role, who has served in combat, honourably served our nation in uniform?” she says. “Or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?”

A few days before this, Leavitt “gaggled”, as the correspondents say, with a group of reporters on the White House drive. Peter Alexander of NBC asked about White House claims that widespread fraud had been uncovered in the federal government. Fraud is a crime, he said. So would they be turning over evidence to the justice department? Would there be prosecutions?

Leavitt with her husband, Nicholas Riccio, 59, and their baby son, also Nicholas, in September 2024

@KAROLINELEAVITT/INSTAGRAM

She smiled as he spoke, like a tennis player recognising a good shot from an opponent. “It’s a clever question,” she said. But there was fraud, she insisted. “According to an [inspector general’s] report from the Social Security Administration, there was $71 billion of fraud in one single fiscal year.”

“That $71 billion was from 2015 to 2022,” Alexander replied. “Just to be clear.”

“So are you defending $71 billion in fraud, Peter?” she asked, in a clip that was soon circulating on social media as another Leavitt “smackdown”.

“Why is the media so against cutting waste, fraud and abuse from the government?” she asked. “I don’t get it. We won’t be deterred by people like you.”