Karoline Leavitt leaves chaotic White House with immaculate timing

Just after one o’clock on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pulled back the sliding door from the nest of West Wing offices and made a last fleeting appearance at the podium of the James Brady briefing room.

She was there for a quick family photograph for posterity, accompanied by her husband and children. The briefing room was lunchtime-sleepy and almost deserted. Leavitt did not speak, other than to offer those present a cheery thank you.

It was a remarkably low-key conclusion to her extraordinarily high-profile and often abrasive role within the Trump administration.

Elsewhere within the building, events continued at their customary breakneck speed even as Leavitt cleared her desk. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick was adamant that the scuttling of a trade deal that last week seemed complete was all on the US’s northern neighbours, blaming Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney for the breakdown.

By then, Trump had already signed his executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Although Carney came back with a withering reply, it was noticeable that unlike Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico in the early days of his administration, repeating the trick didn’t cause as much of a ripple: if the great lake itself could have shrugged, it would.

In the midafternoon, the president would fly south, to Texas, for a fundraiser event where, he promised, he would campaign on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton against the insurgent Democratic pastor and progressive James Talarico, whom the president referred to as “James Tala-freako.”

Leavitt was leaving, but the chaos was still at a hundred miles an hour.

Since her appointment as the youngest press secretary in the history of the White House in 2025, Leavitt established herself as a fiery and unflappable defender of Trump’s remarks and policies on the podium. She quickly became one of the more high-profile MAGA figures within the administration and provoked predictably strong opinions along partisan lines; revered by the MAGA movement for her trenchant dressing-down of the legacy media and loathed by the left for doubling down on all of Trump’s positions, however outrageous they seemed.

Her abrupt decision, announced earlier this month, to quit the job so she could spend more time with her young family, caught the administration off guard. No replacement has been appointed and it was generally recognised that Trump is unlikely to identify a replacement who will match her for combativeness and performative poise.

The closest Leavitt came to delivering a valedictory was in her Thursday morning ‘gaggle’, the regular semi-formal quick-fire session outside the briefing room when she described the day was “very bittersweet”.

“I’ll miss you guys – I know that’s probably not something anyone would expect me to say but obviously it’s been great working with all of you,” she told the poolers present.

But it was when she was asked if she had any advice for whoever may succeed her that Leavitt gave some inkling as to the prerequisites of serving as press secretary to Trump.

“I think it is most important in this job to understand that President Trump is his own best spokesperson and we joke – [White House communications director] Steven Cheung and I – that is the true communications director here at the White House, and just understanding that, knowing that, and believing in the mission. I think you guys can all see I believe so much in my heart about what this president is doing every day, the policies he is enacting: it’s been an honour to speak on behalf of him and to understand his thinking and relay it to all of you but also to the country for the past 20 months and before that on the campaign. I’ll still be around – I’m gonna just go to the other side so I can spend some more time with my kids.”

There is little doubt that Leavitt is a true believer in the MAGA credo. After serving as an aide in the first Trump administration, she unsuccessfully ran for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022 and then served as spokesperson for Trump during his 2024 campaign, a role that persuaded Trump to elevate her to one of the more demanding roles of his administration – the first Trump presidency burned through four press secretaries.

In her very first briefing, during the last week of January 2025, Leavitt seemed to take pleasure in lecturing the establishment media as to their fading relevance as she announced a rotating seat for new media and offered a chilly rebuke when asked if she saw her role as that of advocating for Trump or “providing the unvarnished truth”.

“It is very easy to speak truth from this podium when you have a president who is implementing policies that are wildly popular with the American people and that is exactly what this administration is doing – it is correcting the lies and the wrongs of the past four years, many of the lies that have been told to your faces in this briefing room,” she said then.

But like the rest of the world, Leavitt could not have been prepared for the supercharged chaos that was about to unfold: Elon Musk and Doge; the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs; the debacle of a summit with Vladimir Putin; the killings of US citizens by Ice agents and protests; the Greenland threats; the war with Iran. Throughout those controversies, she responded to questioning deemed hostile to the administration with sharp rebukes that were often belittling in tone, which Trump loved.

“Your Mama,” Leavitt wrote back before firing a retort when Dáte replied asking if she thought her response was funny. The exchange went viral: Dáte remained unfazed – “a childish response by someone who shouldn’t have that job”, he later said – and Leavitt unrepentant.

Other blow-ups featured over the two years, and on Thursday, the White House marked her departure with a release titled Never Surrender, quoting her various dressing-downs of White House press reporters and the Democratic Party, and her predecessors in the role, describing the podium briefings during the Biden administration as “one of the greatest cover-ups and, frankly, political scandals this nation has ever seen”.

Speculation as to Leavitt’s next move is general: it was confirmed she will work for the Trump-affiliated super Pac Maga Inc, and there have been vague headlines about a network news role.

During that first briefing in January 2025, Leavitt took time to name-check the five cabinet secretaries already approved for the job. It’s instructive to look at their circumstances this week. Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, was ousted in March after a disastrous tenure. Secretary of state Marco Rubio is a front-runner to succeed Trump as the next Republican presidential nominee. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent is the central figure in explaining why the US national debt has tipped past $40 trillion for the first time in history and has endured a chastening week from the markets. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, has just returned from an unscheduled, secretive visit to Russia, where he delivered a message to the head of Russia’s intelligence service to broker a deal on the war, which Trump had promised to end “on day one”. War secretary Pete Hegseth’s hapless stewardship of the Pentagon and the war with Iran have led to a blizzard of critical reportage. Food and energy prices remain high and midterm polling numbers make for grim reading for the Republican Party.

It’s a scenario that nobody could have predicted when Leavitt, 585 days ago, announced that “the golden age of America is truly back.”