The 27-Year-Old Press Secretary Who ‘Speaks Trump Fluently’

There's no truth to the rumor that I was offered the job.

The 27-Year-Old Press Secretary Who ‘Speaks Trump Fluently’

Karoline Leavitt’s rapid rise to the White House showcases both precocious skill and confrontations with the traditional media

By Joshua Chaffin and Meridith McGraw

Feb. 15, 2025 9:00 pm ET

It takes loyalty to rise in Donald Trump’s world. And on Saturday, July 13, Karoline Leavitt demonstrated it in uncommon fashion.

As she tells it, Trump’s then-campaign spokeswoman had only just carried her 3-day-old baby boy home from the hospital when she switched on the television to watch her boss’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

It turned out to be the fateful event at which a would-be assassin’s bullet clipped Trump’s ear. Almost immediately, according to Leavitt, she and her husband decided: She would scrap a planned maternity leave and go back to work, which she did four days later.

“The President literally put his life on the line to win this election,” she would later explain to the Conservateur, a conservative women’s blog. “The least I could do is get back to work quickly.”

That gesture of devotion is one reason—but hardly the only—that explains why Trump has made Leavitt, 27, the youngest White House press secretary in history.

Her first two weeks behind the lectern have showcased both her precocious skills and a tendency to amplify her boss’s exaggerations. Trump is said to adore Leavitt, proclaiming a “star is born” at a recent White House event. But there is no guarantee it will last with a president who cycled through four press secretaries in his first administration.

Leavitt is fast on her feet, brisk and forceful, fielding questions on a variety of topics without consulting notes or a briefing book. Her tone with the so-called legacy media, a hate object among many Trump supporters, veers from no-nonsense to outright contempt.

“So you’re asking a hypothetical based on programs you can’t even identify?” is how she dismissed one reporter’s question.

Leavitt had kicked off the session by informing the White House press corps that it would have to make space in the briefing room for Tiktokers, influencers and other creators of “news-related content.”

She also issued a warning: “We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House.”

Within days, the White House banned Associated Press reporters from several events, citing the outlet’s refusal to go along with Trump’s re-christening of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. On Friday, they were refused access to Air Force One, where the organization has had a seat for decades.

Julie Pace, the AP’s executive editor, said it was “alarming that the Trump administration would punish AP for its independent journalism.” White House Correspondents Association President Eugene Daniels called the decision “a textbook violation of not only the First Amendment, but the president’s own executive order on freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.”

Leavitt was unchastened.

“It is a privilege to cover this White House,” she told reporters, adding: “It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’ and I’m not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that. But that is what it is.”

‘Speaks Donald Trump fluently’

Leavitt’s tenure as spokeswoman will almost certainly differ from predecessors by virtue of the fact that Trump and his right-hand man, Elon Musk, talk to the world unfiltered and at all hours over social media or at White House events. They also at times have a tenuous relationship with facts.

The hazard of facing the media on behalf of such figures was evident when Leavitt stood in the briefing room and confidently repeated Musk’s falsehood that the U.S. Agency for International Development had spent $50 million to supply condoms to Gazans. She was swiftly fact-checked on social media.

Further complicating the job is the head-spinning velocity of Trump’s newsmaking in these early days—launching trade wars; signing a blizzard of executive orders; threatening to take control of Greenland and Gaza; unleashing Musk as a wrecking ball against the civil service; and restarting talks with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Then there is his and Musk’s habit of treating the major publications that once shaped American public opinion as a collective rhetorical punching bag. It is a strategy that delights the faithful but could come back to haunt them—and Leavitt.

“If you were to grade her on the conventional wisdom of the job she gets an F. If you would grade her on the current criteria, pleasing Donald Trump, she gets an A-plus,” said Joe Lockhart, a press secretary under President Bill Clinton. “They’re always only speaking to their own people. They do not care about the rest of us, because they don’t need those people to keep Republicans in charge.”

For now, Trump has a spokeswoman who appears to have been designed in a laboratory to provoke maximum distress among a certain breed of progressive. Those who know her describe her as smart, steely and intensely hardworking, a young working mother who is also an ardent conservative. With her platinum coif, prominent cross necklace and preternatural self assurance, Leavitt is a kind of figurehead for the new MAGA sisterhood.

She learned at the elbows of both Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump spokeswoman-turned-co-host of Fox News’s “Outnumbered,” and Elise Stefanik, the New York member of Congress now in line to be the president’s United Nations ambassador. On Thursday evening, Leavitt and her husband, Nicholas Riccio, a 59-year-old real-estate developer, were spotted by Politico at dinner in Washington with Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“It was clear from day one, when I hired Karoline, she was going to have a very bright future and be on a rocket ship,” Stefanik said of her onetime communications director. Like Stefanik, Leavitt stood by Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol—even when other Republicans believed he was finished and his falsehoods about the election were unforgivable.

“The most noticeable thing I can tell about her is she is in the Oval Office with the president for much of the day,” said Ari Fleischer, the former George W. Bush spokesman. “And I say that because she speaks Donald Trump fluently. She knows his ins and outs. She knows what to say, what not to say. And she’s comfortable.”

Leavitt herself agrees.

“I believe the best way to be successful at my job is to listen to [President Trump] as much as possible and hear every word he says publicly, and then to talk to him privately about his thinking, so I can articulate his message as effectively as possible,” Leavitt said.

Leavitt begins her day at 5 a.m. from home, where she reads news articles and watches morning shows before arriving at her office by 7:30 a.m.

She sometimes shares curated glimpses of her day on Instagram to her over 638,000 followers.

Her confidence at the lectern, Leavitt says, “comes from the foundation from my upbringing, great parents, my faith, and also being an athlete—confidence was instilled in me at a young age.”

Leavitt grew up with two older brothers in a Catholic family in Atkinson, N.H., a small town in the state’s southeastern corner. Neither of her parents attended college. As she has often recounted on the campaign trail, their travails as small-business owners—running an ice cream parlor and a used car dealership—informed her worldview.

Leavitt was known at Central Catholic high school as a feisty third baseman on the softball team, earning a scholarship to nearby Saint Anselm College. Over time, she migrated toward politics. Based in Manchester, the Benedictine Saint Anselm is a renowned training ground for future political operatives. Each election year, the school’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics becomes a frenzy of town halls and candidate events in the run-up to the state’s first-in-the-nation primary.

“She worked her butt off,” said Neil Levesque, the Institute of Politics executive director, who recalled Leavitt less for her ideology than for her energy and upbeat attitude.

Leavitt’s entree to the White House was a 2018 internship in the correspondence office, wading through an ocean of mail. She parlayed it into a full-time job in the press office after approaching McEnany, who recalled that Leavitt was “always coming with ideas.”

After Trump’s defeat in 2020, Leavitt went to work for Stefanik, where she became the media point person in a firefight with Liz Cheney that now looks like an epochal struggle for the soul of the party after the Jan. 6 riots.

Cheney, who called out Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, would be cast into the Republican Party wilderness, while Stefanik took her place in the House leadership.

Leavitt prepares to make a concession speech after she unsuccessfully ran for Congress.

Leavitt prepares to make a concession speech after she unsuccessfully ran for Congress. Photo: Mary Schwalm/AP

Colleagues knew that Leavitt intended to run for office—which she did in 2022, seeking the congressional seat in her home district in southern New Hampshire. She upset two better-known candidates in the Republican primary. “Use people’s underestimation of you as motivation,” Leavitt told students at her alma mater last year. But she was handily beaten by the Democratic incumbent, Chris Pappas, in the general election.

Still, as Sean Spicer, Trump’s first spokesman, noted, the experience of running for office and standing toe-to-toe with Pappas and the press had served her well.

“Overall, I think she’s killing it,” said Spicer, who lasted six months in the role during Trump’s first term. “Admittedly, I’m a little jealous.”