Karoline Leavitt

The White House X account has won notoriety as a coven of young memesters scandalizing the nation. There have been meme images of leading Democrats decked out in sombreros, and clips featuring footage of Iranian military hardware being blown up interspersed with WiiSports.  Now the antics have been taken a step further. There is currently widespread talk of the United States “unleashing hell” on Iran once markets close this weekend, after its initial 15-point peace offer was rejected. There is even some frenzied speculation that things might go nuclear.  Not the best time then, to release a set of cryptic videos that seem to hint at some approaching cataclysm. One, at four seconds long, showed a pitch-black screen overlayed by TV static.

Standing at the podium in the White House, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was, instead of answering questions about the Trump administration, answering questions about her own family.  The mother of Leavitt’s nephew was detained by ICE this week. Bruna Caroline Ferreira, “a criminal illegal alien from Brazil,” allegedly overstayed a tourist visa that expired in 1999 according to the Department of Homeland Security. No doubt an embarrassing moment for the usually forthright Leavitt, it also crystallized how the shockwaves of Trump’s immigration are being felt across America.  Now, I’m an upstanding citizen, thank you very much. I can’t say I personally know anyone who’s been caught up in an ICE raid.

The main thing that has made the Epstein files seem politically (as opposed to morally) significant is that Donald Trump remains obsessed with preventing them from seeing the light of day. He thus devoted much of Wednesday to importuning Republicans such as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert not to back their release. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican,” Trump declared, “would fall into that trap.” But senior Republicans, as Politico reported, are expecting mass vote defections in the coming week as legislators prepare to vote for a disclosure bill sponsored by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie.

No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.” Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, made the right call.

President Trump is waging war on the great British disinformation complex. The White House is gearing up to revoke the visa of British citizen and chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), Imran Ahmed, amid the Trump administration's greater battle against the BBC. By “countering digital hate,” the CCDH means censoring speech it disagrees with. The British campaign group, which has an office in Washington, has pushed for the deplatforming of Trump officials from social media and for greater restrictions on speech online generally. The CCDH advocated that Twitter/X remove Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It was around 3 p.m. last Tuesday when I’d finally heard enough. Karoline Leavitt, for the love of your movement, stop bringing podcasters and influencers into the White House briefings. It’s not good for anyone, not the administration, not for conservative nor new media, and it’s certainly not good for all the righteous goals that got Trump elected in the first place. Take TikTok’s Link Lauren, aka “MAGA Malfoy,” who had the opportunity so few get to ask Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a question in person at the White House.

“I am Kamala Harris. My pronouns are ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I am a woman sitting at the table wearing a blue suit.” That embarrassing exercise in self-parody was how the former vice president of the United States chose to introduce herself at a July 2022 roundtable on how the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade could affect disabled people. Harris’s pandering indulgence in radical gender ideology barely attracted notice at the time. But two years later, just after she took the mantle of the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination from the addled Joe Biden, a video of her awkward self-presentation resurfaced and went viral as evidence of her intellectual vapidity, poor public speaking skills, and display of a sensibility that most Americans reject.

When Karoline Leavitt, the buxom blonde 27-year-old White House press secretary landed the gig, not everybody was convinced. Scott Jennings, the Bush speechwriter turned TV star, had the resume. Megyn Kelly had the fire. But Leavitt? She was a gamble, at best. But Donald Trump wasn’t concerned about her youth and inexperience. “When I was 21, I was building buildings in Manhattan,” he told her. “I believe you can have this job.” He has been vindicated. Since taking the podium, Leavitt has quieted some of her detractors with a performance that’s part combat sport, part masterclass in messaging. Like her boss, she is combative and spunky. Sometimes she mocks the legacy news reporters she feels are asking particularly bad questions.

Days into his presidency, Donald Trump is delivering on one of the campaign promises that no doubt led to his re-election.“Deportation flights have begun,” Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, wrote on X, along with photos of illegal migrants handcuffed and boarding military planes. “President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences.”The deportations are part of sweeping immigration changes Trump has implemented since being sworn-in as commander-in-chief on Monday. Remember that immigration was consistently top of mind for voters during the last cycle.