So much for respecting your elders.
Karoline Leavitt, the new White House press secretary — at 27, the youngest person ever to hold the job — kicked off her first briefing on Tuesday afternoon by reminding all the veteran reporters in assembly that they had become more irrelevant than ever. “Americans’ trust in mass media has fallen to a record low,” she said right off the top.
Twisting the knife, she added: “Millions of Americans —
especially young people — have turned from traditional television outlets and newspapers.”
The place was packed with network television anchors and rumpled newspaper reporters who had been slinging questions around that cramped room since before Ms. Leavitt learned to walk or talk (which would have been sometime toward the end of the Clinton presidency). Smiling, ever-so-sweetly, she told the old-timers they’d have to make room for all the flashy new bloggers, influencers, “content creators” and podcasters she planned to invite to her briefings on a regular basis. It was, she said, high time that the White House “adapt” to the “new media landscape.”
And so, it was a new day in the old briefing room. Mr. Trump’s top flack wasted no time throwing down the gauntlet in her first performance behind the lectern. She was steely and her patience seemed to be in short supply at points. She betrayed no fear and little ambivalence and she seemed quite confident speaking on her boss’s behalf. Which was not always the case for some of her predecessors.
“She has a fantastic relationship with President Trump that’s much deeper than I had,” Sean Spicer, who was Mr. Trump’s first press secretary, said earlier this month. Ms. Leavitt, who was a low-level aide in the first Trump administration, spent the last year duking it out by Mr. Trump’s side as the press secretary for his campaign. She already speaks his language.
But campaigning is different from governing. Her job is no longer to explain why her boss should be president. It is to explain what precisely is happening now that he is. The new administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy this first week has been deep-reaching, and many of the questions Ms. Leavitt fielded on Tuesday concerned
the sudden and sweeping pause of grants, loans and other forms of federal assistance ordered up by the White House budget office. One reporter asked a follow-up about programs that might be cut — citing Meals on Wheels, which provides meals for over 2 million seniors — and Ms. Leavitt seemed almost bored, if not outright irritated. “I have now been asked and answered this question four times,” she said.
There was really only one moment of hesitation. When asked whether she could guarantee that no one would be cut off from Medicaid, she paused for a moment and said: “I’ll check back on that and get back to you.”
Otherwise, Ms. Leavitt was unapologetic and unflinching. Wearing a plum blazer and rather conspicuous cross pendant (she
is a graduate of Saint Anselm, a Catholic school in New Hampshire, where she is from), she peppered her responses with punchy, right-wing political terms like “transgenderism” and “wokeness,” and she seemed to relish telling reporters, “I hope you’re all ready to work very hard.”
As is custom with a new press secretary, she was asked if she viewed her job as telling the truth to the public. Yes, she said, but then she flipped it back on the press: “We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that.” She did not get into specifics but, in what was perhaps a preview of many a briefing room battle to come, she added that “we will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House.”
She was pressed about whether Mr. Trump had personally directed the firings of inspectors general across various government agencies and of prosecutors who had worked with the special counsel, Jack Smith, on the cases he had brought against Mr. Trump. “Yes,” she eventually said, dispassionately.
A question about whether this administration would celebrate Black History Month seemed tailor-made to bait Ms. Leavitt into some kind of headline-making exchange, but she answered it coolly — “We will continue to celebrate American history and the contributions that all Americans, regardless of race, religion or creed, have made to our great country” — and kept the show moving right along.
There was little of the circuslike atmosphere that had defined the briefing room during Mr. Trump’s first term. Though these are early days yet.
So far, the president’s allies seem pleased with Ms. Leavitt’s debut. “Today was incredible,” said Stephen K. Bannon, who served as White House chief strategist in Mr. Trump’s first term.
He had one big piece of advice for her, though: Move the briefings out of the West Wing and into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building down the street. That way, he said, the James S. Brady briefing room could be reverted to its function when John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were in office. “Turn it back into a swimming pool for the president and his family,” he advised.
