When Karoline Leavitt went to the White House stage for the first time, the youngest press secretary promised in history to follow the “revolutionary media approach” of her boss Donald Trump.
Less than a month later, the 27-year-old spokeswoman certainly fulfilled her promise by choosing one of the biggest fights between the US presidency and journalists in decades.
Leavitt surprised the press corps when she announced on Tuesday that the White House itself – and not an independent association of correspondents – would from now on choose which reporters Trump could cover up close in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.
“The Association of De Witte Huis Correspondents has long dictated which journalists can ask the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. No more,” she said.
It was perhaps the most uncompromising performance so far through Leavitt, who seems comfortable, whether she explains Trump’s most bizarre points of talk or exchanges Jabs with reporters.
Leavitt was a Trump veteran who served as his spokeswoman for Campaign in 2024 and set the tone of her very first performance in the James Brady Briefing Room on January 29.
She accused the traditional media of ‘lies’, unveiled a ‘new media’ chair for podcasters and opened the White House for requests for press references in a ride that raised more than 12,000 questions.
‘Most transparent’
Her subsequent versions are equally confronting.
Leavitt sometimes chooses right-wing media who ask Pro-Trump questions and claim that they were excluded under the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden.
Yet she has also given smooth answers to the ‘Legacy Media’, even if she will often cut them before they get the chance to ask a follow-up question-a tradition of the White House for a long time.
Leavitt also learned the first lesson from Trumpworld – never informed your boss.
Trump, the perfect showman and former Reality TV star, has spoken with reporters almost every day since they returned to the White House.
Leavitt, on the other hand, has only given a handful of briefings and is much more likely to pop up on conservative Fox News.
She insists that the Republican is the best person to explain his policy and repeatedly described Trump as the “most transparent president in history.”
But Leavitt has increasingly become the enforcer for what has now become an important struggle for transparency and access to the press.
She was one of the three officials of the White House, mentioned by the Associated Press in a court case after the news agency was blocked for events because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, while a Trump -executive order it renamed.
Leavitt strongly defended the decision to break the AP and said that the new name for the water body was now a “fact” despite Mexico and other countries that refute it.
‘Smart, tough’
Trump said when he appointed Leavitt shortly after his election profit in November that she was ‘smart, tough’.
And Leavitt is nothing, if not a Trump loyalist.
Grown up in New Hampshire, where her family led an ice cream shop, she sent a letter to her university newspaper in 2017 to protest against the fact that a professor of Trump had criticized in class.
A veteran from the press office in his first term she ran without success in 2022 for a chair in the congress in New Hampshire on a Pro-Trump, Pro-Gun ownership platform.
She then won his praise for steel television versions during his 2024 campaign.
On social media, Leavitt is a polished presence, combining photos of life as a young working mother with clips from her on Fox News who goes after the media “fake news”.
Her loyalty was such that she went back to work four days after the birth of her first child when Trump survived a murder attempt at a political meeting in June.
“I looked at my husband and said,” It looks like I’m going back to work, “Leavitt told the magazine Conservateur in an article entitled” Wonder Woman “.
(This story was not edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)