“Trump may just have found his next Karoline Leavitt” ran a headline in the Daily Telegraph this week as the paper cheered one of the replacements for Donald Trump’s über-loyal former press secretary – a woman who would have gladly championed the slaughter of the first-born had the increasingly unhinged president ever floated it.
That woman is Beni Rae Harmony and she ticks all the boxes. Young, woefully inexperienced and incredibly right wing, she looks to be a perfect fix for the Trump White House!
Harmony, who is 24, has joined the administration as assistant White House press secretary, having spent her brief post-university career as a lifestyle host for a local TV channel in Illinois (she claims she was fired for a teary on-air tribute to Charlie Kirk; the station denies it) and as a correspondent for the hard right streaming channel Real America’s Voice.
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Her appointment has already raised eyebrows given the emergence of a photograph showing her and an older man posing with guns and wearing “FUCK JOE BIDEN” t-shirts in front of Christmas decorations. It was apparently posted to Instagram in 2021 by Jarome Bell, a far right Republican who mounted a failed campaign for Congress in 2022. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in response that “Beni Rae Harmony has been a trusted voice for the MAGA movement as a White House correspondent”.
And Trump will certainly be able to trust her – as in her brief journalistic career she’s been nothing less than loyal to the administration she was ostensibly reporting on. Accompanying him on a trip to Ireland last month, she was able to ask a number of penetrating questions, including why the media didn’t give more coverage to his “great capture” of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, what he thought of “AOC and Mamdani laughing at the 9/11 ceremony in New York” (the pair smiled as they greeted each other), why Canada is so awful to deal with, if there will be a Trump name on the ballot in 2028 and whether polling showing only 20% of Irish people held a favourable opinion of him was fake.
Indeed, it was during the Ireland trip that Trump appeared to take a shine to Harmony, at one point jabbing his finger at her while asking, “Would anyone like to be press secretary?” Three weeks later, on October 2, she announced that she would be joining the White House press team.
The White House’s gain, though, is journalism’s loss. While much of the content on her personal website seems to have vanished since she took the Trump job, visitors can still read ‘Behind the Scenes of My First Assignment at the White House’, a breathless account of her first assignment way back in, er, January 2026, which is written like a ‘what I did on my holidays’ assignment.
“There was only one problem: I had never been there. I had seen the White House from afar, studied it in history books, but I had never stepped onto its grounds. My heart began to race,” she wrote.
“There’s no way I can do this, I thought. Where do I go? What if I say the wrong thing? What if I don’t belong here? The doubts came quickly, one after another. My mom looked at me and said with pride, “You were made for this. God prepared you.” With those words, I walked out of my small basement bungalow and into the unknown.”
And now she’ll be there full-time, using all her journalistic nous and experience to ensure the Trump administration continues to get all the positive coverage it currently enjoys. One to watch, we think!
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