{"id":660587,"date":"2026-08-28T07:26:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T07:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/660587\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T07:26:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T07:26:16","slug":"karoline-leavitt-leaves-chaotic-white-house-with-immaculate-timing-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/660587\/","title":{"rendered":"Karoline Leavitt leaves chaotic White House with immaculate timing \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just after one o\u2019clock on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pulled back the sliding door from the nest of West Wing offices and made a last fleeting appearance at the podium of the James Brady briefing room. <\/p>\n

She was there for a quick family photograph for posterity, accompanied by her husband and children. The briefing room was lunchtime-sleepy and almost deserted. Leavitt did not speak, other than to offer those present a cheery thank you. <\/p>\n

It was a remarkably low-key conclusion to her extraordinarily high-profile and often abrasive role within the Trump administration<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Elsewhere within the building, events continued at their customary breakneck speed even as Leavitt cleared her desk. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick<\/a> was adamant that the scuttling of a trade deal that last week seemed complete was all on the US\u2019s northern neighbours, blaming Canada\u2019s prime minister Mark Carney<\/a> for the breakdown. <\/p>\n

By then, Trump<\/a> had already signed his executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Although Carney came back with a withering reply, it was noticeable that unlike Trump\u2019s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico in the early days of his administration, repeating the trick didn\u2019t cause as much of a ripple: if the great lake itself could have shrugged, it would. <\/p>\n

In the midafternoon, the president would fly south, to Texas, for a fundraiser event where, he promised, he would campaign on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton against the insurgent Democratic pastor and progressive James Talarico, whom the president referred to as \u201cJames Tala-freako.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause he is a little freaky and he\u2019s not a man who represents the values of Texas,\u201d he explained. <\/p>\n

Leavitt was leaving, but the chaos was still at a hundred miles an hour.<\/p>\n

Since her appointment as the youngest press secretary in the history of the White House in 2025, Leavitt established herself as a fiery and unflappable defender of Trump\u2019s remarks and policies on the podium. She quickly became one of the more high-profile Maga figures within the administration and provoked predictably strong opinion along partisan lines; revered by the Maga movement for her trenchant dressing down of the legacy media and loathed by the left for doubling down on all of Trump\u2019s positions, however outrageous they seemed. <\/p>\n

\"WhiteWhite House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (second from left) takes a group photo with her team on her last day in the press briefing room of the White House. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman\/The New York Times<\/p>\n

Her abrupt decision, announced earlier this month, to quit the job so she could spend more time with her young family, caught the administration off guard. No replacement has been appointed and it was generally recognised that Trump is unlikely to identify a replacement who will match her for combativeness and performative poise. <\/p>\n

The closest Leavitt came to delivering a valedictory was in her Thursday morning \u2018gaggle\u2019, the regular semi-formal quick-fire session outside the briefing room when she described the day was \u201cvery bittersweet\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll miss you guys \u2013 I know that\u2019s probably not something anyone would expect me to say but obviously it\u2019s been great working with all of you,\u201d she told the poolers present. <\/p>\n

But it was when she was asked if she had any advice for whomever may succeed her that Leavitt gave some inkling as to the prerequisites of serving as press secretary to Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it is most important in this job to understand that president Trump is his own best spokesperson and we joke \u2013 [White House communications director] Steven Cheung and me \u2013 that is the true communications director here at the White House and just understanding that, knowing that, and believing in the mission. I think you guys can all see I believe so much in my heart about what this president is doing every day, the policies he is enacting: it\u2019s been an honour to speak on behalf of him and to understand his thinking and relay it to all of you but also to the country for the past 20 months and before that on the campaign. I\u2019ll still be around \u2013 I\u2019m gonna just go to the other side so I can spend some more time with my kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is little doubt that Leavitt is a true believer of the Maga credo. After serving as an aide in the first Trump administration, she unsuccessfully ran for congress in New Hampshire in 2022 and then served as spokesperson for Trump during his 2024 campaign, a role that persuaded Trump to elevate her to one of the more demanding roles of his administration \u2013 the first Trump presidency burned through four press secretaries. <\/p>\n

In her very first briefing, during the last week of January 2025, Leavitt seemed to take pleasure in lecturing the establishment media as to their fading relevance as she announced a rotating seat for new media and offered a chilly rebuke when asked if she saw her role as that of advocating for Trump or \u201cproviding the unvarnished truth\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt is very easy to speak truth from this podium when you have a president who is implementing policies that are wildly popular with the American people and that is exactly what this administration is doing \u2013 it is correcting the lies and the wrongs of the past four years, many of the lies that have been told to your faces in this briefing room,\u201d she said then. <\/p>\n

\"AA map labelling Lake Ontario as Lake America is displayed as Donald Trump signs an executive order during an event in the White House. Photograph: Andrew Harnik\/Getty Images <\/p>\n

But like the rest of the world, Leavitt could not have been prepared for the supercharged chaos that was about to unfold: Elon Musk and Doge; the \u2018Liberation Day\u2019 tariffs; the debacle of a summit with Vladimir Putin; the killings of US citizens by Ice agents and protests; the Greenland threats; the war with Iran. Throughout those controversies, she responded to questioning deemed hostile to the administration with sharp rebukes that were often belittling in tone, which Trump loved. <\/p>\n

One text exchange with SV D\u00e1te, the long-serving White House correspondent with the Huffington Post, was illustrative of the underlying tension. In October 2025, D\u00e1te pointed out that the proposal of Budapest as the location of truce talks between Russia and Ukraine might be deemed insensitive as it was in that city that the Russians had promised not to invade its neighbour in return for its relinquishing of nuclear weapons. \u201cWho suggested Budapest?\u201d D\u00e1te messaged.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour Mama,\u201d Leavitt wrote back before firing a retort when D\u00e1te replied asking if she thought her response was funny. The exchange went viral: D\u00e1te remained unfazed \u2013 \u201ca childish response by someone who shouldn\u2019t have that job\u201d, he later said \u2013 and Leavitt unrepentant. <\/p>\n

Other blow-ups featured over the two years and on Thursday, the White House marked her departure with a release titled Never Surrender, quoting her various dressing downs of White House press reporters and the Democrat Party, and her predecessors in the role, describing the podium briefings during the Biden administration as \u201cone of the greatest cover-ups and, frankly, political scandals this nation has ever seen\u201d.<\/p>\n

Speculation as to Leavitt\u2019s next move is general: it was confirmed she will work for the Trump-affiliated super Pac Maga Inc, and there have been vague headlines about a network news role. <\/p>\n

\"WhiteWhite House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (C) participates in a group photo at the White House. The nation’s youngest White House press secretary leaves the job after 19 months. Photograph: EPA <\/p>\n

During that first briefing in January 2025, Leavitt took time to name-check the five cabinet secretaries already approved for the job. It\u2019s instructive to look at their circumstances this week. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, was ousted in March after a disastrous tenure. Secretary of state Marco Rubio is a front-runner to succeed Trump as the next Republican presidential nominee. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is the central figure in explaining why the US national debt has tipped past $40 trillion for the first time in history and has endured a chastening week from the markets. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, has just returned from an unscheduled, secretive visit to Russia where he delivered a message to the head of Russia\u2019s intelligence service to broker a deal on the war which Trump had promised to end \u201con day one\u201d. War secretary Pete Hegseth\u2019s hapless stewardship of the Pentagon and the war with Iran have led to a blizzard of critical reportage. Food and energy prices remain high and midterm polling numbers make for grim reading for the Republican Party.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a scenario that nobody could have predicted when Leavitt, 585 days ago, announced that \u201cthe golden age of America is truly back.\u201d <\/p>\n

With a full two years of this administration left, whoever succeeds Karoline Leavitt could be in for a bumpy time. That won\u2019t be her problem as she stood at the podium in the Brady press room for the final time on Thursday. Even her fiercest critics would acknowledge that her timing has always been always immaculate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just after one o\u2019clock on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pulled back the sliding door from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660588,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,356,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,6221,107,65,66,67],"class_list":["post-660587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-donald-trump","tag-featured-news","tag-featurednews","tag-headlines","tag-latest-news","tag-latestnews","tag-main-news","tag-mainnews","tag-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories","tag-trump-presidency","tag-us","tag-world","tag-world-news","tag-worldnews"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117171952204983168","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}