White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is stepping down from her role after 19 months of deriding the press, dodging questions and pushing false claims on behalf of the administration.
During her time in the position, Leavitt echoed many of President Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and oversaw White House efforts to turn the press pool into a less adversarial, more sycophantic body.
“I have relished holding the liberal media accountable and ensuring the American people hear the truth about President Trump’s successes,” Leavitt said in a social media statement announcing her departure.
Here’s a look back at some of the moments that defined Leavitt’s tenure as White House press secretary.
Leavitt’s time in the role has been marked by numerous attacks on the press.
In October 2025, JS’s senior White House correspondent, S.V. Dáte, submitted a simple question to the White House only to be met with a childish response. Dáte had reached out about an upcoming summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he asked who was responsible for suggesting Budapest, Hungary, as the location for the meeting. Rather than provide a professional reply, Leavitt texted back, “Your mom did.”
When asked if the conversation was funny to her, Leavitt sent a disparaging message calling Dáte a “far left hack” and asked him to “stop texting me your disingenuous, biased, and bullshit questions.”
These attacks were also prevalent in the White House briefing room, and included moments when Leavitt straight up ignored reporters or lashed out at them.
During one instance in April 2025, Leavitt asked journalists in the briefing room if they had any additional questions, just to leave the podium after multiple reporters raised their hands to signal that they did.
At a January 2026 briefing, The Hill’s Niall Stanage pressed Leavitt on comments made by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who had said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are “doing everything correctly.” Stanage asked Leavitt how that could be, since “32 people died in ICE custody last year, 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE, and Renee Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent.”
“Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?” Leavitt went on to ask.
“Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably,” Stanage responded.
Instead of answering his question, Leavitt responded by ranting at Stanage and accusing him of being a “biased reporter with a left-wing opinion,” who was “posing in this room as a journalist.”
In June 2025, Trump said anyone protesting the military parade for the Army’s 250th anniversary would be met with “very heavy force.” In the wake of that statement, NOTUS White House correspondent Jasmine Wright asked Leavitt about the kind of protest that Trump supports or finds acceptable.
Leavitt noted that Trump supported peaceful protests and that he opposed violence of any kind.
“So if there were peaceful protests on Saturday for the military parade, President Trump would allow that?” Wright followed up.
“Of course the president supports peaceful protests,” Leavitt told Wright, adding, “What a stupid question.”
During another exchange that month, Leavitt singled out CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand after the journalist published a report on an early Pentagon intelligence assessment that found Trump’s 2025 strikes on Iran hadn’t done as much damage as he claimed.
Leavitt oversaw major changes to the White House press pool and briefing room.
At the start of Trump’s second term, Leavitt announced the White House press team would determine who could join the press pool, a cadre of reporters who cover the White House. Previously, the White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent group, had selected pool members.
Since that announcement, the administration has curtailed some publications’ participation in the pool and invited a number of conservative outlets that are friendly to Trump to the White House briefing room. Additionally, the White House has added a “new media” seat to the briefing room that’s sometimes been allocated to right-wing podcasters. Leavitt has also held special briefings for MAGA influencers.
These changes have only added to concerns about the White House’s efforts to undercut independent journalism and have come in conjunction with new restrictions the Pentagon has rolled out for its press corps.
In February 2025, the White House barred The Associated Press from events in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One when it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide. The outlet has since been in a months-long legal battle with the administration over the restrictions the White House has tried to impose. The Wall Street Journal was also removed from the White House press pool for the president’s Scotland trip in July 2025 in the wake of its reporting on a note Trump allegedly wrote to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Leavitt repeatedly attacked the judiciary.
Much like Trump, Leavitt has gone after judges who’ve blocked aspects of the president’s agenda and repeatedly lambasted the judiciary when outcomes have been unfavorable to the White House.
In March 2025, Leavitt accused U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of being a “Democrat activist” after he ordered the Trump administration to halt its deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants. As JS’s Jen Bendery pointed out, Boasberg had ruled in Trump’s favor many times before.
Leavitt also stated that Boasberg was appointed by former President Barack Obama, only to be corrected by NBC News’ Garrett Haake, who noted Boasberg was originally nominated to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia by former President George W. Bush, and later elevated by Obama.
She spread false claims and spun Trump’s statements.
While defending Trump’s trade war in March 2025, Leavitt claimed “tariffs are a tax cut for the American people, and the president is a staunch advocate of tax cuts.” This was in response to Josh Boak, a reporter with The Associated Press, who had described the proposed levies as “tax hikes.” PolitiFact has also since rated Leavitt’s description as “false,” citing economists who say the cost of tariffs are passed on to consumers.
Leavitt added that she regretted “giving a question to The Associated Press” after Boak pushed back on her characterization.
In November 2025, Trump boosted a social media post calling for the execution of Democratic members of Congress, who had reminded service members that they could refuse illegal orders.
“HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!” read a post that Trump shared. “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” Trump added in a separate social media post.
Leavitt downplayed Trump’s amplification of the threat and instead tried to argue that Democrats’ message was the problem.
“Let’s be clear about what the president is responding to, because many in this room want to talk about the president’s response, but not what brought the president to responding in this way,” Leavitt told reporters, while saying Trump didn’t want to execute lawmakers. “You have sitting members of the United States Congress who conspired together to orchestrate a video message to members of the United States military … encouraging them to defy the president’s lawful orders. The sanctity of our military rests on the chain of command.”
Leavitt touted the administration’s transparency when asked why administration officials were meeting with Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) about a petition tied to the release of files related to Epstein. It demonstrates “transparency that members of the Trump administration are willing to brief members of Congress,” Leavitt said in early November 2025, even as reporting indicated Trump opposed the petition and that White House officials wanted Boebert to drop her support for it.
“This administration has done more with respect to transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein than any administration ever,” Leavitt added.
Trump later changed course on the petition after it became clear that many House Republicans were poised to oppose him.
In May 2025, Leavitt was pressed about a video Trump had shown in a meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. In that meeting, Trump sought to argue that white South Africans were being targeted and pointed to a video he claimed showed “burial sites” of more than a thousand victims. As The New York Times reported, the video did not show burial sites and instead captured a memorial procession for a white South African couple that had been killed.
When asked about the discrepancy by NBC News’ Yamiche Alcindor, Leavitt tried to paper over Trump’s false claims about the so-called burial sites.
“The video showed images of crosses in South Africa about white farmers who have been killed and politically persecuted because of the color of their skin,” Leavitt responded. “And those crosses are representing their lives.”
She called follow-ups on the subject a “ridiculous line of questioning.”
In March 2025, Leavitt responded to an Atlantic story about how editor Jeffrey Goldberg had been mistakenly added to a Signal chat with government officials discussing a strike on Yemen by casting the piece as part of a “misinformation campaign.”
“If this story proves anything, it proves that Democrats and their propagandists in the mainstream media know how to fabricate, orchestrate and disseminate a misinformation campaign quite well,” Leavitt claimed.
Those statements were just a few of the ever-changing responses the administration gave in response to the Signal scandal.
Leavitt went off on Gen Z.
In a July 2026 Fox News interview, Leavitt criticized her Generation Z peers and claimed they were used to “getting everything handed to them.”
“This generation, my generation, I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths,” she said. Leavitt later posted a statement clarifying the remarks following swift backlash.