Bettors’ Favorite for Karoline Leavitt’s Job Breaks Silence

The frantic race to replace Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary is heating up after the bettors’ favorite broke her silence on whether she’s gunning for the job.

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Leavitt, 28, announced last week that she’ll be stepping down as Donald Trump’s official mouthpiece to spend more time with her family after the birth of her second child in May. Insiders said Trump’s incessant phone calls while she was on maternity leave were a factor in her decision.

Betting site Kalshi had Alina Habba, 42, as the frontrunner in that race by a wide margin on Wednesday, handing her a 41.2-percent chance of landing the job, with a 24.3-point lead on her nearest contender. Habba previously served as Trump’s personal attorney and acted as U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey from March to December last year, when a court ruled she’d been illegally appointed.

Habba reacted to her status. “Flattered by the Kalshi odds, but I’m not in the running for any job,” Habba posted just after 6 p.m. on Wednesday evening. “However, if I’m getting a new one, I’d love for one of these anonymous sources to let me know first. Fake news remains the undefeated champ… well… until I come at them.”

Habba’s coy denial cuts against other signs that she’s not only in the running for the job, but is actively campaigning for it. She’s said that whoever “gets that podium next better come ready for a fight they have big shoes to fill,” and over the weekend, she attended Trump’s Bedminster golf course for a dinner said to have basically functioned as a ring-kissing ceremony for the president’s would-be press secretaries. One source with knowledge of the event told the Daily Mail on Tuesday it had unfolded like an episode of The Apprentice. “It reeks of desperation,” the person said.

Habba’s cryptic sign-off to her Wednesday post did little to dampen the shock to her odds, which instantly crashed to a decidedly less optimistic 7 percent. That’s only the market read on her chances, though, and Trump has privately said he’s keen for another woman to replace Leavitt.

If that preference holds, Habba may still be in with a chance—provided she’s able to beat the president’s personal assistant and “human binkie” Natalie Harp, Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly, Homeland Security spokesperson Katie Zacharia, her predecessor Tricia McLaughlin, RNC spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko, former Kennedy Center spokesperson Roman Davari, and at least 12 other female candidates who’ve made Kalshi’s list.

The men who’ve thrown their hat into the ring include fedral housing chief Bill Pulte, Breitbart’s D.C. Bureau chief Matthew Boyle, and White House Communications Director Steven Cheung.

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Also in the running is CNN’s resident conservative pundit, Scott Jennings, who the Daily Beast reported last week is an early frontrunner for the job.

Jennings, 48, served under the George W. Bush administration and later as an aide to now-missing Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell. He’s since established himself as one of Trump’s most foam-mouthed TV defenders, and, by the look of it, wants Leavitt’s old gig even more than Habba does.

The Daily Mail, for which Jennings is a columnist, reported this week that the pundit had secretly met with Deputy Chief of Staff Susie Wiles at least twice to discuss taking on the job, with one of those clandestine conferences taking place before Leavitt even announced she was stepping down.

Wiles, known as Trump’s “ICE Maiden” for her grip on White House operations, considers Jennings her chosen candidate. “They speak often,” sources with knowledge of her thinking on Jennings told the Mail. “The job is his if he wants it,” one of those people added. “And he does.”

Jennings has remained shtum about whether he’s got his eyes on the podium even as he’s ramped up his defense of the president in a series of media appearances that are hard to read as anything less than audition tapes for the role. Only on Monday night, he went to bat hard for Trump over Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff’s weekend criticism of the 80-year-old president’s closeness with his 35-year-old personal assistant, Harp.

It did not go well. Jennings blasted Ossoff as a “disgusting coward” for supposedly “insinuating the only possible reason [Harp] could have a job in politics is because she’s a concubine for a politician.” CNN host Laura Coates immediately shut him down by pointing out that Trump has repeatedly attacked female journalists for far worse—giving Jennings just a flavor of the challenges he’ll face if he lands the job he won’t admit he wants.