As usual, Karoline Leavitt is immaculately dressed. Not a single blonde hair is out of place. But at this briefing, on July 17th, for perhaps the first time during her tenure at the podium, the 27-year-old White House press secretary is about to dangle.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about the Epstein files,” asks a reporter, “and the president’s comments yesterday calling it a hoax. Can you clarify which part of the Epstein hoax is the hoax part?” Leavitt licks her lips, almost nervously. “The president is referring to the fact that the Democrats have now seized on this,” she says. “As if they ever wanted transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein.” Angle one: blame the Democrats.
“I understand he wants to move on from the story,” the reporter presses. “But what is stopping the administration… putting out what is appropriate and letting the American people decide?” Leavitt is visibly uncomfortable now. These questions aren’t coming from one of the outlets traditionally hostile to Trump – the reporter is Fox News’s Jacqui Heinrich. Time to try angle two: “Those are questions for the Department of Justice,” Leavitt says. “That’s out of the president’s control.”
Leavitt is the youngest person ever to hold the position of White House press secretary – beating the record held by Nixon press secretary, the 29-year-old Ron Zeigler. She makes an unlikely figure to be a powerhouse of the second Trump administration, but that’s exactly what she has become. Savagely confident, almost reassuring in her plausibility, Leavitt lies for the president with a level of brazenness that is frankly awe-inspiring. She sometimes seems able to channel Trump more powerfully than Trump can channel himself.
She made her name not just by proving to Trump her willingness to power through the most outrageous nonsense – that the Biden administration spent $50m on condoms in Gaza (they didn’t); that the wrongly-deported American citizen Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a leader of the MS-13 crime gang (he isn’t); that the Pete Hegseth Signal chat leak about US missile strikes on Yemen was a “hoax” (it wasn’t); that the price of eggs has fallen “more than 50%” since Trump took office (it hasn’t); that James Boasberg, the judge who issued a stay on deportations, was an Obama-appointed “Democrat activist” (he was appointed by George W. Bush) – but in showing she can turn right around and accuse the media themselves of being the liars, with not just a straight face but a smile.
Under Leavitt, the press office has been run with a level of brutality absent from the first term. Outlets that don’t toe the line are punished. After the Associated Press refused to follow the administration in calling the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” they were barred from the briefing room. Leavitt warned reporters that if they “lie” about the administration they would be “held accountable”.
“We’re going to look into reports before we confirm them from this podium or before we take action and I suggest journalists who actually care about truth do the same,” she said in June, swiping at the BBC on a story about Gaza (the BBC defended its reporting).
But now, even this gelded press room isn’t buying what she’s selling. Leavitt, increasingly desperate, is forced to dodge nine aggressive questions about Epstein at the July 17th briefing, from outlets across the political spectrum. She tried to turn them round to attack the media, without success. She tried to throw attorney general Pam Bondi under the bus. That didn’t work either. She tried to imply this wasn’t a story “that the American people care about”. None of the usual tricks, suddenly, seemed to work any more. Not with this.
And it’s not just the Epstein story – there’s another scandal brewing too. One that involves her personally.
In the first Trump administration, the White House press podium seemed almost cursed. First to hold the position for Trump was the former RNC communications chief Sean Spicer. A member of the republican old guard who found himself dangling in the impossible position of having to defend Trump from questions, Spicer simply drowned. He resigned after an 182-day tenure marked by humiliation after humiliation after humiliation; a national punchline, he wound up as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars in 2019. Spicer was followed by Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted just ten days before being fired.
Political advisor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the daughter of former Arkansas governor and one-time presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, fared better: she lasted almost two years, and would go on to follow in her father’s footsteps as governor of Arkansas. Sanders was the one who started to work out how to evolve the role, to make it fit under a president who, first off, communicates almost constantly directly with the electorate, and second, lies constantly. She barely held briefings, though – repeatedly breaking the record for the longest time without holding them, with 41, 42, and 94-day gaps.
Sanders’s tenure started to show what the job of Trump’s press secretary actually is. Spicer’s mistake, it turned out, was that he was capable of experiencing shame. When Sanders was caught admitting that she’d lied to reporters, it didn’t matter. She had realised that in Trump’s media ecosystem that’s not a bug: it’s a feature.
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After Sanders, Melania Trump’s former chief of staff Stephanie Grisham stood in from July 2019 until the following April without much distinction. But it was Kayleigh McEnany, a TV pundit and former Fox News producer, who came close to perfecting the role as Trump truly envisions it, and laid the groundwork for the second term. McEnany’s more combative style allowed Fox News to run segments with titles like “MEDIA TAKE DOWN: Kayleigh McEnany BIG MOMENTS As Media Questions President Trump Behavior”; and “HAD YOUR CHANCE: Kayleigh McEnany BLASTS Reporters For Taking TOO Many Questions.”
The role of press secretary evolved past being about simply answering questions. It is now about showmanship, creating made-for-sharing viral moments, and – ultimately – about turning the White House podium around and wielding it as a bully pulpit for attacks on the media.
In August 2019, McEnany had been in the job only a month when she was introduced to a 21-year-old former intern, then working in the White House mailroom, called Karoline Leavitt – and hired her straight away. Given the podium at the start of Trump’s second term, Leavitt, who was born a couple of months after Tony Blair became Prime Minister, became the most powerful avatar of the press secretary-as-ringmaster yet.
She always doubles down. Turns reality against itself, goes through the motions of outraged truth and reverses it with such supreme confidence that it makes you doubt reality itself. She is the iron anvil of Trump’s reality-distortion forge. It’s relentless, and she knows it’s driving everyone crazy. That’s the whole point. She is the queen of gaslight, and she seemed set to break the press office curse once and for all. Steve Bannon, who regularly featured Leavitt on his show The War Room, told Politico he believed she is destined for higher things. “After she’s spokesman for a year or two, I think she’s going to get a cabinet position. Maybe chief of staff,” he said.
But two things have cropped up that may finally change that. The first is that, with the Epstein story, for the first time her powers of deflection have reached some sort of limit. She can’t blame the media, because there is a split down the middle of MAGA-world: much of the far right is just as incensed by the administration’s evasiveness as the left. She can’t blame the Democrats either, much as she’s tried.
And her second headache? That comes from her own failed campaign for Congress in 2022.
Leavitt was born in August 1997 in Atkinson, New Hampshire. She was educated at a private Catholic school in Massachusetts, and then Saint Anselm College, a small private liberal arts university in Goffstown, New Hampshire, on a softball scholarship.
She started her media career writing for the student newspaper, the Saint Anselm Crier, writing columns as a conservative provocateur. Her first article opened: “The liberal media – it is debatably the most appalling factor of the entire election cycle, besides Hillary Clinton somehow dodging an indictment, of course.” She started a broadcasting club on campus which helped her land a job working for Fox News during the 2016 election as a news assistant and then associate producer while still a student.
She graduated Saint Anselm in 2017 and, aged 21, applied for a job with the new administration cold. “I was fresh out of school, I literally applied for it online – just went on whitehouse.gov and filled out the application,” she said on a podcast called Highlight Her in 2022. “I never expected to receive the phone call.” Six weeks later, she was on her way to Washington.
As Leavitt described it, “when I was in the White House I just again took advantage of everything I could,” making powerful friends – including Steve Bannon. She parlayed her internship into a job in the mailroom, and then was connected with McEnany by a friend in the Secret Service.
“I usually don’t get nervous in interviews, but I was visibly shaking and almost blacked out,” Leavitt told a reporter for the Eagle-Tribune, her local paper in New Hampshire, in 2020. “I’ve been nervous in games before, but this was different. This was the Kayleigh McEnany and the White House.” She was offered the job the next day.
Quickly, she became something of a protegé to McEnany, who was taken with the tough and obviously ambitious young intern. Leavitt’s desk, in the West Wing, was closest to the door and therefore the first thing reporters saw when they entered the press office: as she described it to the Eagle-Tribune, she was “the first line of defense with Kayleigh.”
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After Trump lost the 2020 election, Leavitt took a job with Elise Stefanik, the high-profile congresswoman for a conservative upstate New York district. Stefanik – whose nomination by Trump to the post of UN ambassador was withdrawn in March 2025 – hired her as communications director. But Leavitt had higher ambitions, and in July 2021 she announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination in New Hampshire’s first congressional district.
At first, she was considered a long-shot candidate – not a serious contender. Tweets like “Joe Biden absolutely did NOT legitimately win more votes than Donald Trump!” put her, at that brief moment in time, back out on the extreme end of the party in her wholehearted embrace of MAGA ideology in general and election-trutherism in particular. In the primary, party grandees including minority leader Kevin McCarthy and minority whip Steve Scalise strongly backed her opponent, Matt Mowers.
Leavitt once again proved adept at leveraging her connections. She became a regular guest on Bannon’s War Room podcast, and Bannon became a strong supporter. And in early 2022, she flew down to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump. He didn’t endorse her – but, impressed, he didn’t endorse Mowers either, which was enough. Leavitt won the primary – though she went on to lose the election to the incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas.
But, in a bombshell new FEC disclosure uncovered on July 28th, Leavitt was revealed to have failed to pay back even a cent of more than $326,000 in debt her quixotic campaign ran up – and some of those contributions appear to have violated campaign finance laws. It is too early to tell exactly what the fallout from that will be, but the revelation couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Under this pressure, the previously unflappable Leavitt has started to flounder. On July 21st, she barred Tarini Parti, a reporter from the Wall Street Journal, from the press pool for Trump’s trip to Scotland, over the paper’s reporting into the president’s links to Epstein. But the questions have only intensified, and the 27-year-old has started losing her cool, snapping at reporters.
Leavitt really has an audience of only one: Donald Trump. If the president suddenly decides he isn’t happy with her recent performance, or thinks she risks becoming a liability over her campaign finance legal woes, he won’t hesitate to throw her under the bus, and she knows it.
Donald Trump bullshits. He is nature’s perfect idiot. He is free-associating. Everything he says is utterly un-parsable. He distorts reality simply by existing: what he actually believes is, in a way, beside the point. Leavitt, on the other hand, has the uncanny ability to take Trump’s unrealities and bend reality itself around them – and around her. There’s a sort of jujitsu to the way in which Leavitt lies that’s entirely different to her boss, and in a way, much more terrifying.