I’m obsessed with Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt

Are we scared yet?

“Welcome to the Hunger Games!”

An audio version of this article (narrated by me!) is available here:

Karoline Leavitt became the youngest White House press secretary in history when she snagged the job at just 27 years old on 20 January 2025.

And I’m obsessed.

She is terrifying. I’m convinced she was created in a MAGA lab. She not only looks like the picture-postcard definition of traditional American values, but was a softball star who went to college on a sports scholarship (because of course!). She’s properly religious (not fake Trump-style religious). She interned at Fox News, wrote college papers defending Trump’s first travel ban and lambasting the ‘liberal bias’ of mainstream media, and – best (worst) of all – she ran for Congress in July 2021 at 23 years old. Want to really choke on your MAGA chips? She ran on a “proudly pro-life, pro-liberty, pro-immigration control, and pro-gun” Republican platform BECAUSE OF COURSE SHE DID. (She lost, but only just.)

What makes her truly fascinating and most dangerous, though, isn’t her ideologically perfect background, it’s her limitless bravado, her willingness and ability to bend reality to further Trump’s rhetoric, and the fact that she offers a more palatable progressive-seeming version of MAGA womanhood than the firebrand lunacy of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Leavitt is just 27 and yet she owns the White House press briefing room. Standing in spitting distance of the Oval Office, she mouths off as Trump’s proxy in front of some of the most ruthless journalists in the world (the ones she hasn’t banned yet, anyway) and doesn’t break a sweat. Her hands don’t shake. Her voice doesn’t tremble. Her eyes don’t twitch. She doesn’t shout, berate, or froth at the mouth. Instead, she calmly and straightforwardly lays out lie after lie after lie after lie to billions of people. She gaslights on a global scale. She twists facts on the fly and deliberately obfuscates until meaning evaporates into a cloud of exasperation and hyperbole… And she does it brilliantly.

Oh, to give so few fucks. To care so little about what millions of people think of you. Can you imagine the freedom of it? The sheer conviction – political or delusional – it must take to stride into the most public arena on the planet and brazenly bullshit your way through every single day.

I spent most of my twenties lying beneath a pool table in Wetherspoons clutching a bottle of Reef (remember Reef?!) while muttering along to So Solid Crew’s 21 Seconds. I was not snapping, “What a stupid question” to a seasoned reporter on live TV and then flouncing out of the West Wing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I want to be Karoline Leavitt. Heaven forbid. If I woke up in hell, I’d be standing behind her podium in a purple pantsuit with big gold buttons, saying things like, “It is very easy to speak truth when you have a president implementing policies that are wildly popular.” (Come again?) What I am saying is: she has a level of chutzpah I can’t help but admire… and fear. Her entire job is to deny reality on the hoof, in front of a baying crowd of people whose entire job is to sniff out bollocks. AND SHE’S SUCCEEDING. THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER.

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She is neither a MAGA trad-wife or a “warrior culture mom” like the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, Kari Lakes or Sarah Palins. She works non-stop, is incredibly media savvy and ambitious, is pass-agg rather than simply agg, and projects a professional fuck-you sheen over grassroots populist approachability. Her personal life doesn’t fit the bill either. She’s married to 59-year-old property developer Nicholas Riccio, gave birth to their son before they were married (quelle horreur!) and returned to work four days later. She’s MAGA 2.0: a next-gen blend of ideological loyalty and image management that’s terrifying, impossible to dismiss, and that we underestimate at our (literal) peril.

Leavitt snarkily advocates for the disassembly of the very rights she personally benefits from as a woman in power without ever acknowledging the conflict or irony. Perhaps without even seeing it? Which begs the question: does she know that what she’s doing is dangerous? Does she recognise the contradiction between what she says and what she lives, between what’s actually happening and what she says is happening (hello, hypernormalisation!), or does she genuinely believe that she’s fighting the good fight? Has she necked the Kool Aid or does she know it’s all horseshit but has bigger ambitions?

I don’t know which option is more frightening. All I do know is that she gives less than zero shits about what I or anyone else thinks (except Trump) – and in this era of thin-skinned, whiny narcissist politicians who put personal grievance above global safety, maybe she’s the one we should really be afraid of.

Just One More Thing

Why does Leavitt get so much less media attention than other Trump-world figures (such as Stephen Miller?) Her role is central to the entire MAGA project, as seen by her creation of the briefing room’s New Media seat for right-wing influencers and her banning of the Associated Press. She controls the narrative – and populism lives or dies on the strength of its narrative. She is the chief propagandist. Might it be a case of classic sexism in the same vein as how people continuously call the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, ‘Rachel from Accounts’. Maybe they see Leavitt as nothing more than a PA who’s fannying about with some press releases (that’s a Briget Jones reference, FYI). Well, I don’t think that’s who she is. I think she’s worthy of some panic and by God, there’s enough to go around.

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*Exceedingly modest reminder that I have written eight bestselling mental-health books which have been translated into dozens of languages. I’ve also written a book about the TV show Friends which would make a delightful gift for any Friends obsessives. All are available to buy online or at your local bookshop.