How Karoline Leavitt Debased Her Job
· The Atlantic
The lie is the elemental matter of the Trump administration. The value of lying is Donald Trump’s deepest belief. He built his celebrity image through shameless and constant deceit that permitted him to bounce from blunder to blunder while constantly reeling in new suckers. Lying is also what binds his loyalists to him: The highest calling of any figure in Trump world is to refuse any concessions to reality when Trump commands it, and the surest ticket to oblivion is to speak the truth.
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All of this has made the job of press secretary in a Trump administration less, not more, important than it normally is. In most administrations, the White House press secretary has a unique role in shaping public opinion, whereas the other staffers are concerned principally with governing. In Trump’s White House, distorting reality, rather than trying to improve it, is the highest priority for every official, including and especially the president himself. In an administration where everybody’s main priority is to lie on television, the role of the press secretary is redundant.
Karoline Leavitt, who departed as press secretary this week, did the job perfectly well. But the job, as defined by this administration, is not terribly demanding. Historically, press secretaries engaged in “spin,” a now-antiquated term to describe the delicate art of arranging facts in the most flattering light. Spin requires real skill. Its practitioners must grasp the underlying reality, which points must be danced around and which emphasized, and how to walk a reporter from their skeptical premise to the administration’s desired conclusion.
Leavitt never engaged in spin, and she probably wouldn’t know how. Her method of replying to queries relied on the blunt-force repetition of talking points, however unresponsive they might be, sprinkling in heavy doses of personal abuse and slander.
[From the July issue: Use it or lose it]
Consider a sample of her style, plucked somewhat at random. It is the first item on a celebratory list of Leavitt highlights released by the administration—which is to say that it is not some unfortunate slipup but one of her proudest moments.
The exchange in question took place on January 15, 2026, between Leavitt and Niall Stanage, the White House columnist for The Hill. Stanage asked Leavitt how to square then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s statement that the department had done “everything correctly” with the fact that 32 people had died in ICE custody over the past year, 170 U.S. citizens had been detained, and Renee Good had been shot and killed.
A few lines of defense sprang to my mind as I listened to the question. If my job were to defend the administration, I’d reply that, yes, 32 people died in custody, but that figure says nothing about whether those deaths were caused by ICE. And don’t all police agencies sometimes detain the wrong person in the course of investigating crimes? If ICE is performing somewhat less efficiently than other law-enforcement agencies, maybe it needs more resources for facilities and training. A handful of facts and figures could have reframed this horrific scandal as a one-off failure amid mere business as usual.
Leavitt used none of these defenses. She first responded by asking Stanage why he believed that Good had been shot. When Stanage replied that he believed that an agent had acted recklessly, Leavitt savaged him as biased. “You’re a left-wing hack. You’re not a reporter. You’re posing in this room as a journalist. And it’s so clear by the premise of your question,” she said. “You should be reporting on the facts. You should be reporting on the cases.”
[David A. Graham: A dangerous new attack on press freedom]
Despite attacking Stanage for supposedly failing to report on “the facts,” which his question included, Leavitt’s reply did not cite any numbers at all. “Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens, who ICE is trying to remove from this country?” she asked, without producing them herself.
In the same exchange, Leavitt complained that Stanage had degraded the august profession of White House reporter: “You and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist—you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat.” In reality, Leavitt herself, in one of her first and most important moves as press secretary, invited numerous opinion journalists and influencers to hold permanent seats in the briefing room alongside traditional journalists. So even if it actually were true that Stanage is “biased,” her complaint that this would disqualify him from the job would still have been at odds with her policy.
This exchange, in miniature, shows how Leavitt conducted her briefings. Instead of the journalists in the room, her audience was loyalists who require no convincing and who believe that any news story that reflects poorly on Trump is by definition a hoax. Leavitt communicated effectively to this audience because she seemed to be one of them.
For this reason, she will be easily replaced by another, equally effective functionary plucked from among the millions of Americans capable of the rudimentary task of responding to questions with repetitive, childish insults. In an administration rife with memorable rogues, Leavitt will fade into obscurity.