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The worst White House press secretary of all time
On most days in what many people still call the “United” States of America, our president sets the daily national news agenda with noxious blasts from his favorite media platform — the one, of course, that he owns and operates.
To put it another way, our president is making money selling us information we are due as members of what’s supposed to be an open democratic society. Reporting to us is in the job description. Donald Trump simply doesn’t care.
For Trump, this proposition is a win-win. Those who need or want to hear what he has to say keep him in business. Those who disapprove or try to ignore him have no effect. Trump has been impeached twice, is a convicted felon and publicly defends insider trading. You think he gives a squat about what you think? Honestly, he doesn’t care what he thinks. He only cares about the money.
I must confess that I long ago lost interest in what he was selling. Since it is a professional necessity for me to stay tuned in, I also must confess that I can only do so now by envisioning Trump as a failed standup comic, or a Hallmark movie watched while on bad hallucinogens and cheap speed — the kind we used to call a “greenie.”
Trump may be the biggest greenie of all time.
I find it difficult to stomach people who are only half as annoying as Trump. Who wants to watch the dozing Mad Hatter, doped up on stimulants, while his cursed kitchen demons poke and prod him through another “Weekend at Bernie’s” moment in the Oval Office? Sometimes I wonder what would happen if he didn’t wake up. Would he find a way to make money off that?
If he could, he would, and Truth Social would be involved somehow. After all, that platform remains Trump’s trumpet for his “Darwin Mayflower” agenda of total world domination.
On Wednesday, by way of this gateway to his shallow soul, the president told us that one of his “most trusted aides” was leaving the White House. Did Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offer their resignation? After all, he’d left them holding the bag on Air Force One while he snuck away in a catering truck before being evacuated on a military jet from Turkey last month.
No. So far both Rubio and Bessent are still around. But we’ll see. Rubio didn’t look happy on Wednesday, as he stood before a group of reporters and was asked about Trump using him as a human shield. He smiled weakly and quickly turned away.
The person actually leaving, of course, is White House “pep secretary” Karoline Leavitt, who returned from paid maternity leave about a month ago and has only briefed the press corps twice since returning.
Did I miss anything?
Trump said on Truth Social that Leavitt is departing her role at the end of the month so she can spend more time with her children and family: “A decision I totally understand and respect!”
Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sarah Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.
That’s almost word for word the same explanation Sarah Sanders gave when she left Trump’s first administration. Trump’s response was also similar. Then, a few short breaths later, Sanders was running for, and winning, the Arkansas governor’s office once occupied by Bill Clinton.
Leavitt, with her cheerful brand of obfuscation, lies and propaganda, has the potential to go much further than Sanders did. In today’s politics, the bar is so low that the sky is unlimited for someone like her.
In fact, Leavitt may well become the gold standard for press secretaries into the foreseeable future. In politics, success creates imitators. Leavitt, by never failing to placate, flatter and worship her boss, has displayed a singular and decisive pathway, although not a very original one, to political success. And she has a singular talent for it.
In Leavitt’s world, Trump is always right. He has won every election by a landslide, slayed the dragons, corraled the wild beasts and brought peace, tranquility and a great economy to his kingdom. Don’t worry about Jeffrey Epstein, the Iran war or anything else. All is well, except that the Democrats are communists and ravenous beasts who probably eat their young. The price of eggs is down, and the price of gas will be, any day now
In reality, Leavitt is without a doubt the worst White House press secretary that I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering since the day I first met Larry Speakes during the Reagan administration. Larry was polite and professional. I never had a problem getting access to ask a question. In this administration, reporters aren’t allowed access to the press secretary’s office. So much for transparency.
Trump’s escape from Ankara was a huge embarrassment, exacerbated by a floundering and incompetent press secretary. When the Secret Service devised a plan to transport Bill Clinton from India to Pakistan in 2000, it was similar to the plan that Trump employed on July 8. But back then, press secretary Joe Lockhart got the Secret Service to change the plan.
“Protecting the president is important, but there was a way we could protect the president without putting other lives at risk. We didn’t want to use the press and staffers as decoys,” Lockhart explained.
Our Summer sale is on!
He worked with the Secret Service to develop a strategy whereby people who were present or watching on television could see that Clinton did not board the same plane as the staff and press. Three smaller military jets were nearby and was impossible to tell which plane Clinton had actually boarded. “That’s the difference between a public servant who serves the public and a monarch who believes the public serves him,” Lockhart said. “We didn’t lie, we included the press and we kept everyone safe. In Trump’s case it isn’t that they didn’t know the protocol. They didn’t care.”
In 2026 in Turkey, Trump ditched us and didn’t bother to tell us about a threat that could have gotten us all killed. Later, he said, “If I go, you go,” when apparently, he already went. Leavitt lacked the understanding, intelligence or inclination to manage the situation. Her value does not lie in critical thinking. The planning, and consideration employed by someone with Lockhart’s experience is simply beyond her capabilities, although the required empathy really shouldn’t be.
Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. Of course, they still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.
Ironically, Bessent and Rubio are among the most experienced and professional of Trump’s closest advisers and top officials. Sure, that’s a low bar, but nothing Trump does encourages deep thought and professionalism. He favors those like Leavitt.
It’s all part of his “simple approach” to life, as exemplified in his so-called Patriot Games, conducted on Tuesday. Some compared this event to the fictional Hunger Games, but according to reporter John Bennett from CQ/Roll Call in a Tuesday pool report, it was “more like American Ninja Warrior.”
Trump lavished more effusive praise on Leavitt than anything he has recently said about Jeanine Pirro, Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel. They still fared better than Bessent and Rubio, who were offered up as a potential sacrifice on Air Force One.
Trump, regarding the final competition with the air of a Caesar, praised the teenage competitors’ “deep love for the country,” and went on to say that, “love of … our great country has never been better.”
All I know is that this event, which was supposed to represent one male and female from every high school in the United States, looked suspiciously monochromatic.
The reporting was colorless too. Here’s what passed as a pool report from the event: “’I knew what I wanted to do so I just did that,’ the kid from Utah told a camera afterward. It was aired on the screen here.” A reminder for those who didn’t know or had forgotten: The White House press pool is in place to report on the president, not write P.R. copy on a teenage athlete from Utah.
What was the president’s goal with this event? Who knows. Don’t look for his communication staff, or his press secretary, to provide useful information. On the other hand, if you want to insult the press, obfuscate the facts, ignore important questions and call the media people “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” you want Karoline Leavitt.
If you want facts, here’s one they’ll probably miss: The term “Patriot Games” may be a weak callback to an inferior Harrison Ford political thriller, but at root it is a reference to an Irish folk ballad about a teen going to war that satirizes and questions the political fervor of people like Trump. As I recently learned, Bob Dylan once considered recording it.
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Some press secretaries have bucked their boss, understanding that their true audience isn’t the audience of one in the White House but hundreds of millions of people across the United States, and billions more around the world, whatever their political views.
It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anything like that from a press secretary, but no one has mastered the dark art of hucksterism with Leavitt’s aplomb. She has been the cheering cherub of disinformation, the bright face and upbeat smile of divisiveness and the wholesome All-American grin of hate, death and destruction.
She fits in well with the phony Patriot Games, the potentially disastrous escape from Turkey and the monotonous daily march into madness this administration represents. Trump will miss her, but the rest of us shouldn’t.
If Leavitt is being honest about her reasons for leaving, which few people in the Trump administration ever are, then I wish her well. You only get one chance to raise your kids, and if more of us took that seriously, the world would be in far better shape.
But Leavitt rarely tells the truth, so we’ll probably soon find her anchoring a Fox News show or running for office in her home state of New Hampshire, where she lost a congressional race in 2022. One could certainly lead to the other.
After all, the sky is the limit for this new breed of press secretary, an unabashed public worshipper of the king who is more like a court jester than an information node; one who is wholly ignorant of the commitment, fortitude and intelligence the job requires, but entirely devoted to the art of covering their boss’s exposed rear end.
Welcome to the Brave New World. Join us at the Patriot Games.
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