When Trump takes office on January 20, 2024, Karoline Leavitt (photo, left), 27, will be the youngest-ever White House press secretary.
She isn’t ready for the job. When Washington Post reporter Emmanuel Felton asked her to comment on a story, she flew off the handle.
Felton’s question was provocative, but reporters often ask loaded questions, and a spokesperson has to be able to defuse hostile questions and defend her boss.
Felton was doing a story about the rise in hate crimes against minorities since Trump entered the political limelight a decade ago. Following routine journalistic practice, he contacted the Trump campaign for comment.
Leavitt’s current job is 2024 Trump campaign spokesperson. Felton’s email alluded to a black woman whose fence was spray-painted with a racial slur. His question was,
“What happened in Lawnside was part of a wave of racial incidents that occurred in the days following Trump’s reelection. Around the same time that Hines’s fence was sprayed, Black people across the country were receiving text messages that said they’d been ‘selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation.’ And at the same time that Lawnside residents came together to discuss the graffiti on Hines’s fence, a group of self-identified neo-Nazis marched and shouted the same slur in Columbus, Ohio. While none of these events can be traced directly back to Trump, experts say that his rhetoric has been tied to an increase in hate crimes across the nation.”
A good spokesperson would respond, “President-elect Trump condemns these incidents and repudiates racism in all its forms.” You can dispute whether this is true, but if my job was to make him look better than he is, that’s what I would say. Instead, Leavitt lost her cool, and ranted on “X”,
“I just received one of the most absurd emails EVER from the Washington Post. This ‘reporter’ is doing gymnastics to try and sow division and blame President Trump for something that he admits in his email has no trace to him whatsoever; This is exactly why NOBODY trusts the Fake News Media; Jeff Bezos warned his staff before the election, and they’re still not listening to him!”
This is not what press secretaries do. The job is to answer the question, and disarm its hostile insinuations. Instead of defending her boss, she attacked the reporter, and left Trump dangling in the wind. If she can’t do better than that, she may not last very long in the White House press briefing room.