Karoline Leavitt “has served President Trump well,” said David Gardner in The Daily Beast. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the 29-year-old White House press secretary, who last week announced she was stepping down to look after her two young children, did so by defending him “with all the wide-eyed devotion of a member of a religious cult.” During her 20-month tenure, “the worst press secretary in modern times” routinely attacked reporters as biased lefty hacks, hotly defended Trump’s sharing of a social media video that portrayed the Obamas as apes, claimed the Democratic Party’s constituency was “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals,” and called Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring a “hoax.” One of Trump’s most fiercely loyal aides, “she drank the Kool-Aid. The whole bottle.” Trump wanted to keep her, but he might have inadvertently driven her out, said Margaret Hartmann in New York. During her recent nine-week maternity leave, Trump reportedly “kept pestering her about when she was coming back,” making it clear to the burned-out Leavitt that she had to choose between her family and the very needy president.
Leavitt leaves behind “a press operation reimagined for the MAGA media landscape,” said Kara Voght and Meridith McGraw in The Wall Street Journal. During her tenure, the White House booted many mainstream journalists out of the press pool so it could seed it with pro-Trump podcasters and influencers. Leavitt knew she could count on “softballs” from Trump sycophants, said Bill Goodykoontz in The Arizona Republic, such as a question from a representative of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s streaming channel about how Trump managed to look “healthier than ever before.” She even ousted the Associated Press for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Leavitt’s predecessors were all spin doctors, but no one before had used the position “not just to defend their boss” but to deny what he said even when it was on video.
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