President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Karoline Leavitt to be his White House press secretary, meaning the longtime Trump advocate will soon be the youngest White House press secretary in history, and potentially one of the administration’s most visible figures.
As national press secretary, Leavitt, 27, spent much of the 2024 race as the public-facing spokesperson for the Trump campaign.
⮞She’s been critical of the media since her college years
She has long been critical of what she calls “the liberal media” and ran for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022 after beating more established opponents in the Republican primaries.
Leavitt was born and grew up in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, attending a Catholic high school in Massachusetts and working at her family’s ice cream shop during the summer holidays.
She studied at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire on a softball scholarship. There, she was one of a small number of conservatives, The Washington Post previously reported. She wrote for the student paper, and also penned letters to the editor, accusing her professors of bringing liberal bias into the classroom and criticizing the media for what she described as unfair treatment of then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election.
“Say what you want about Donald Trump,” she wrote at the time. “He is certainly not perfect, but he is without question running against not only a crooked candidate but the crooked and biased media as well. The liberal media is unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false.”
At the beginning of her campaign for Congress, Leavitt fully backed Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. She also tweeted at one point that “Joe Biden absolutely did NOT legitimately win.”
Later, she said in an interview that Biden was the “legitimate” president — though when pressed if she would have voted to certify the election had she been in office on Jan. 6, 2021, Leavitt said “probably not,” after reiterating her belief that “fraud and irregularities” occurred.
➤She took on a combative role with the media during the 2024 campaign
As the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Leavitt accompanied Trump to rallies, campaign events and his court appearances in Manhattan, and went on conservative and national media to echo many of Trump’s talking points, calling the criminal cases against Trump a “witch hunt that comes from the top, comes from Joe Biden" and decrying the Democrats in office
She shared Trump’s combative approach to the press, saying during a warm-up speech at one of his rallies: “I have the great pleasure of fighting the fake news media all day, every day.” CNN ended a live interview with her in June when she accused Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, who the network chose to moderate the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, of bias.
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