“Clear a path!” shouted the big shots of TV news as they tried to squeeze their way through reporters packed like sardines into the White House briefing room to get to their front-row seats. Tempers frayed, foreheads perspired and necks strained similar to those of passengers itching to get off a plane.
The first press briefing of a new administration is always a standing-room-only event. This time, it was the second Donald Trump administration and the debut of Karoline Leavitt, who pointed out that she is the youngest person to serve as White House press secretary. The 27-year-old beats the record of Ronald Ziegler, who was 29 when he was Richard Nixon’s spokesperson.
If you’re loyal enough, you’re old enough. On Tuesday, Leavitt showed the media hordes and TV viewers that she is more than capable of going full North Korea. Smoothly, serenely and pugnacious-enough-but-not-too-much, she defended her boss’s federal funding freeze and draconian immigration crackdown. She also talked him up as a sort of Renaissance man and Goat (greatest of all time) rolled into one.
In Leavitt’s telling, Trump is “the most transparent and accessible president in American history” and there has never been a president who communicates “as openly and authentically”. He is “the hardest-working man in politics” and “there is no negotiator better”. His policies are “wildly popular” and he is responsible for a new “golden age”.
Her slick delivery style, with almost no “ums”, “ahs” or verbal stumbles, was a radical departure from the way Trump’s first ministry of untruth began. The hapless Sean Spicer began with the false claim that Trump had a bigger inauguration crowd than Barack Obama and went downhill from there, claiming: “Sometimes we can disagree with the facts.”
Spicer once showed up wearing an upside-down American flag pin on his lapel and claimed that Adolf Hitler, who gassed millions of Jews during the Holocaust, did not use chemical weapons. He was lampooned by Melissa McCarthy and a motorised lectern on Saturday Night Live.
After Sarah Huckabee Sanders there was Stephanie Grisham, who never held a briefing, then Kayleigh McEnany, eerily similar to Leavitt in appearance, with blond hair and a conspicuous Christian cross necklace flashing all sorts of cultural signals – did you just come from Fox News or are you heading there next?
But Leavitt, who worked at the White House in Trump’s first term and ran for Congress at the age of 23, is the most finely honed version of all. She personifies the Trump 2.0 upgrade: faster, smarter, leaner, meaner, better organised and less chaotic. Executive actions have been more ruthlessly targeted and leaks have been fewer. In the struggle between incompetence and malevolence, malevolence is winning.
So it was that when Leavitt walked to the lectern without the customary binder, only some A4 sheets of paper, and took aim at the media, she did so with precision air strikes, not the scatter-gun that Spicer used to wield. She came armed with a chart to show young Americans’ declining trust in traditional media and preference for blogs, podcasts and social media instead.
The White House must adapt, she said, announcing a shake-up to allow “new media voices” into the briefing room. “Whether you are a TikTok content creator, a blogger, a podcaster, if you are producing legitimate news content … you will be allowed to apply,” she said.
She said the first questions would duly go to “new media members” but stretched the definition somewhat with Mike Allen of Axios and Breitbart’s Matt Boyle. Breitbart was once described by its then executive chair Steve Bannon as “the platform for the alt-right”, a movement associated with efforts to preserve “white identity” and defend “western values”.
Next up, Leavitt was asked about her loyalty to the president versus her loyalty to facts. She insisted: “I commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day. I commit to speaking on behalf of the president of the United States.” When the president is Trump, who still hasn’t admitted he lost the 2020 election, are those two statements reconcilable?
Yet Leavitt sought to turn the tables with a chilly warning: “We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that.”
The rest of the exchanges were a mix: some tough questions from what Leavitt had described as the “legacy media”. Some softballs from more Trump-friendly outlets including this humdinger: “Welcome. You look great, you’re doing a great job.”
April Ryan of theGrio asked whether there was any word on whether the administration would celebrate Black History Month? Leavitt replied carefully: “As far as I know, this White House certainly still intends to celebrate, and we will continue to celebrate American history and the contributions that all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed, have made to our great country, and America is back.”
Translation: All Lives Matter (death to DEI). Leavitt moved on in a flash before Ryan could follow up.
There was remarkably little about Trump’s January 6 pardons, dismal surrender to the climate crisis or half-jokes about running for a third term. But Trump’s press secretaries are usually performing for an audience of one. Just as he expects his generals to be as loyal as Hitler’s, he expects his spokespeople to spin like Kim Jong-un’s. On that criterion, Leavitt will receive the presidential thumbs-up.
