Karoline Leavitt Is Leaving the White House Podium. The Lies Will Live On

Opinion admin August 28, 2026 0 Comments

Karoline Leavitt Is Leaving the White House Podium. The Lies Will Live On

Karoline Leavitt’s last day as White House Press Secretary is today. She is leaving to spend more time with her very young children and very old husband. In fairness, her husband isn’t that old, but their 32-year age difference (which far bests that of her boss and third wife, if not quite her boss and his current work wife…) is one of those weird MAGA tidbits that add a little flair to bitchy columns like this one.

Leavitt is MAGA’s Tracy Flick, the peppy, straight-A student with boundless ambition and sharpened incisors. Her tenure will be remembered primarily for her singular devotion to the world’s worst human, sure, but the thing I will always think of first when I think of Karoline Leavitt – and I do not plan on thinking of her again after I finish writing this piece – is The Necklace.

That big gold cross dangling at her sternum perfectly encapsulated the administration’s “do as I say, not as I do” attitude. She was wearing The Necklace, for example, when she called The Hill reporter Niall Stanage “a left wing hack posing as a journalist” from the White House podium after he asked her why Renee Good was killed. One might puzzle at the hypocrisy but Leavitt understood something that too much of the “mainstream media” failed to grasp: that the aesthetics of MAGA have always been far more important than the policies. Leavitt knew that, in Trump’s America, the medium is more than the message. In Trump’s America, there is no message at all. There is only media.

The job of Press Secretary has always been to spin. But from the moment Sean Spicer falsely declared Trump’s first inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe,” the job has been to conjure an aging loon’s florid imagination into reality.

If you foolish Americans thought the job of President Trump’s Press Secretary was to inform the nation of White House business, Leavitt begged to differ. To deflect. To bulls–t. She learned well at the feet of her mentor, Trump’s second Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who famously said in Feburary, 2020: “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.”

Friends, I hate to spoil the ending for you, but coronavirus did, indeed, come here. Of course, McEnany paid no price for that as Leavitt will pay no price for insisting, as she once did while comparing her role as Press Secretary compared to the previous administration, “Everything I’m telling you is backed by real, factual data” Friends, I hate to spoil the ending for you again, but Leavitt, like her boss, has lied to your faces nonstop. And that is “real, factual data.”

Leavitt always understood that her job was not to inform the public, but to please her sponsor. I don’t mean Trump – I mean the deep-pocketed conservative influence project of which Trump is the primary beneficiary.

Leavitt was made for this moment. Only 27 when she assumed the role, she was the nation’s first Gen Z Press Secretary, as comfortable on social media as she is changing her husband’s diapers. (That was the LAST old husband joke, I swear.) Born into a New Hampshire family, Leavitt got involved with politics young, writing conservative op-eds in support of Trump while a student at St. Anselm College. No wonder Trump called her “one of the best Press Secretaries in the history of the United States”—like his other current favorite blonde in the administration, Leavitt made her entire professional life about the only person her boss cares about.

And now it’s over.

When she walks out of the White House for the last time today, carefully stepping over the East Wing rubble to avoid scuffing her heels, Leavitt will find many in need of her talents. The appetite for charismatic liars is boundless. Think about what Big Tobacco could do with a woman who is happy to go in front of the country and declare that Trump’s sweeping tariffs, which some analysts calculate cost the average American family $1,700 during its first year of implementation, were a “tax cut for the American people” Or consider what Big Crime could do with a spokesperson who repeatedly called the Epstein scandal a “hoax.”

Perhaps she will stick with a gig in front of the cameras, like McEnamy, who returned to Fox News. (Perhaps she will podcast. We will all, eventually, podcast.) Perhaps she will enter politics, as her predecessor Sarah Huckabee Sanders did. Leavitt already has one failed Congressional race under her belt. But now with heightened name recognition and The Necklace, she might consider another run?

In the meantime, however, Leavitt has already declared her next move: a return to MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC, where she can continue doing essentially the same job without having to pretend she’s answering questions on behalf of the United States government. The medium remains the same. Only the podium changes.

None of these people stay out of our faces long enough for us to put them forever out of mind. Because when the medium is all you are, you stop existing without it. So Leavitt, like Spicer and Huckabee and McEnamy and Kellyanne Conway and and Scott Jennings and Michael Cohen and all the other Big Mouths in Trump’s orbit, will hang around. She’ll continue to lie on behalf of those whose cossetted worldview doesn’t allow for such niceties as “facts” or “math.”

So good riddance, Karoline Leavitt. May the next chapter be one of reflection. It’s what the man who hung from the cross around your neck would have wanted. Unfortunately, the Big Guy is still in need of spin.