What’s YOUR opinion of Karoline Leavitt?

Leavitt addressing the press during the criminal trial of Donald Trump in New York
After losing to Pappas, Leavitt began working for MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC.[9] She was featured in a video produced for Project 2025, a political initiative to prepare for a Republican presidency, training political appointees on how to counter the federal bureaucracy.[29] Leavitt began working for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign in January 2024 as his national press secretary.[30]

White House Press Secretary (2025–present)
Leavitt’s first press briefing
On November 15, 2024, president-elect Trump named Leavitt as his White House press secretary.[31] She is the youngest White House press secretary in history.[32] She was given a smaller office in the West Wing in comparison to her predecessors, with the office reserved for press secretaries instead being occupied by Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel.[9] Leavitt gave her first press conference on January 28, 2025, beginning the briefing by seeking to elevate non-traditional media.[33] During the press conference, she falsely said that $50 million in taxpayer dollars had been intended for use in funding condoms in the Gaza Strip.[34] Reporters indicated that the erroneous claim appears to originate from the government initiative DOGE misinterpreting a grant to prevent the spread of HIV in Gaza Province, Mozambique.[35][36]

Her tenure marked a separation from precedent, particularly with non-traditional media. In February, Leavitt announced that the White House would select who participated in the presidential press pool.[37] That month, she said that “new voices are going to be welcomed” alongside traditional media.[38] The following month, Axios reported that the White House sought to change the seating chart for reporters, potentially by appointing Leavitt as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.[39] Leavitt was named as a defendant in Associated Press v. Budowich (2025), a lawsuit that began after Trump’s staff moved to block the Associated Press from certain press events over the Gulf of Mexico–America naming dispute. According to the lawsuit, Leavitt told Zeke Miller, the chief White House correspondent for the Associated Press, that the organization would be barred from certain areas of the White House unless it referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.[40]

In her tenure as press secretary, White House briefings began to reflect Trump’s conflict with the news media. According to an analysis by The New York Times in April 2025, Leavitt called on individuals standing on the perimeters of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room—a collection of reporters from The Gateway Pundit, Real America’s Voice, One America News Network, The Daily Signal, LindellTV, The Daily Wire, and Turning Point USA—approximately a quarter of the time. Leavitt additionally added a “new media” seat in January, calling on its occupants first in every briefing; the journalists sitting in the seat were primarily from right-wing media outlets and online news publications.[41]

Communications style
Leavitt has employed a combative communications style.[7] Responding to a question from a journalist for The Hill on the killing of Renée Good, who said that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed Good acted “recklessly” and “killed her unjustifiably”, Leavitt called the reporter “biased” and a “left-wing hack”. Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary for president George W. Bush, cited her approach mirroring Trump’s style as the reason for her continued tenure, in contrast to the abrupt removals of Trump’s previous press secretaries.[42] Kayleigh McEnany, who mentored Leavitt, told USA Today that her approach was to bring “evidence-based accountability”.[43]

Political positions
Leavitt’s campaign for New Hampshire’s first congressional district focused on lowering taxes and lessening regulations to support small businesses, challenging critical race theory in public schools and educational indoctrination, supporting school choice, increasing ID requirements on voting, and funding police. She also supported Trump’s immigration policies and opposed vaccine mandates. Leavitt is a proponent of repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which provides service providers immunity from liability for third-party content generated by users.[18]