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Karoline Leavitt, 28, is leaving her demanding job as Donald Trump’s press secretary to spend more time with her two young children and her 60-year-old husband. According to a post by Trump On Truth Social, Leavitt will be departing her role at the end of the month and will serve as one of Trump’s “top outside advisors”.
In other words: the official version of events is that Leavitt is resigning on her own terms for family reasons and not because Trump’s approval ratings are at record lows and she’s a rat fleeing a sinking ship.
But is the official version of events the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Don’t bother asking Leavitt – I’m not sure she knows much about the T-word. She might have been the youngest White House press secretary in history, but there’s no denying her communication style made her eminently qualified for a role in the Trump administration. I won’t muck about with euphemisms such as misrepresented or stated without evidence or made false claims. Leavitt’s legacy in government was attacking Trump’s enemies and spouting lie after lie after lie.
Being a lowly writer means I am held to far higher standards about what I can say than the departing press secretary or her boss, the president of the United States. Unlike Leavitt or Trump, I actually have to provide facts and evidence to back up my assertions. So here we go: here are a few fun facts about Leavitt’s tenure in public office.
First, there’s her role in promoting lies about the economy. One of the most significant economic policies of Trump’s second term has been his global tariffs, which were initially extended even to volcanic islands inhabited only by penguins. During a press briefing in March 2025, Leavitt told reporters that tariffs were a “tax cut for the American people”. Economists have said this is nonsense. “Economists don’t agree on much, but we agree tariffs are taxes on consumers,” Tara Sinclair, a George Washington University economist told fact-checking website Politifact. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation has also run the numbers and said that in 2025, the Trump tariffs “amounted to an average tax increase of $1,000” per US household.
But what’s $1,000, eh? It’s nothing to Trump, who made a staggering $2.2bn during the first year of his second term in various questionable ways. One imagines it’s also not much to Leavitt, who earns just under $200,000 in her role and whose husband, Nicholas Riccio, manages what has been described as a multimillion-dollar real estate business.
And if you feel aggrieved about tariffs increasing the already sky-high cost of living, according to Leavitt, you should just work harder (or marry a real estate tycoon.) “Some of these kids, and I call them kids because they are in their 20s and have never had real jobs, and they’re complaining things are expensive,” Fox News’ Jesse Watters told Leavitt last month during a conversation about young Democratic party voters. “Yes, things are expensive when you don’t have a real job.” Leavitt agreed, adding that her generation had been raised with “silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them”. That’s un-American, she suggested, because this country “was built on meritocracy and hard work, pulling up your sleeves, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps”.
It’s not just tariffs where Leavitt’s math seems to be off. In January 2025, the press secretary justified Trump’s order to freeze federal funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by claiming it was wasting money.
“[T]here was about to be 50m taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Leavitt said. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money. So that’s what this pause is focused on: being good stewards of tax dollars.”
To be very clear: that condom claim was a lie. Documents shows that no condoms were sent anywhere in the Middle East, let alone to a place undergoing what many experts have termed a genocide. The US did, however, provide billions of taxpayer dollars to help Israel destroy Gaza, which has arguably reduced births a lot faster than condoms would have. The dismantling of USAID, justified by Leavitt, has also increased pregnancy complications and maternal death in poor countries. A study published in the Lancet journal last year estimated that US funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths, including more than 4.5 million children under age five, by 2030. I guess, if you’re Leavitt, being “good stewards of tax dollars” means contributing to mass death and immiseration. Money well spent!
As well as her flair for numbers, Leavitt will also be remembered as a consummate professional who remained dignified under pressure. Last October, for example, SV Dáte, Huffington Post’s senior White House correspondent, asked Leavitt via text message who had suggested Budapest for a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine. Her response? “Your mom did.” When Dáte then asked if Leavitt thought that was funny, she replied: “It’s funny to me that you actually consider yourself a journal [sic]. You are a far left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face. Stop texting me your disingenuous, biased, and bullshit questions.”
That was a brief look at Leavitt’s past. What’s in store for her future? Despite her comments about her family, don’t expect her to go full tradwife. None of the ambitious women advancing the Trump administration’s anti-woman agenda want to devote their own lives to the domestic drudgery they extoll for others. They’ve got less privileged women to do the childcare and the cooking and the cleaning for them. No, rather than being a tradwife, one imagines Leavitt might end up with a nice little gig on Fox News or Bari Weiss’s CBS. Or perhaps, like Sean Spicer, her predecessor under Trump 1.0, she might go the reality TV route and regale us all on Dancing with the Stars. No doubt there will also be a “tell-all” book in her future in which, depending on which way the political winds are blowing, she’ll tell us all the things she thinks will rehabilitate her reputation.
And, of course, for now there’s her new role as an “outside advisor”. I can’t tell you exactly what that entails but I can tell you that, going forward, communications with Trump and his outside advisers can apparently be considered privileged. On Monday, after Todd Blanche was sworn in as attorney general, the justice department’s office of legal counsel issued a 21-page-opinion about the president’s “executive privilege” which protects communication between Trump and advisers who don’t work for his administration. This makes a future Democrat-led investigation into the Trump administration a lot harder as his advisers – which will now include Leavitt – will not be able to be comprehensively questioned by Congress. Exactly the sort of move you’d expect from a president that Leavitt has called the “most transparent” in history.
Best of luck, then, to Leavitt in her future endeavors. I’m sure she’ll roll up her designer sleeves, pull herself up by her bootstraps, and find a way to make huge amounts of money. And best of luck to all of us. If there’s one thing that you can be sure about when it comes to the revolving door that is the White House, it’s that no matter how bad the person leaving is, the replacement is always worse.
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Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
