Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
Karoline Leavitt is the second-longest serving White House press secretary throughout President Donald Trump’s two terms in office.
She has held her position since Trump began his second term on Jan. 20, 2025, and ranks only behind now-Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, who held the role from July 2017 to July 2019.
Trump’s other press secretaries haven’t stuck around nearly as long.
His first, Sean Spicer, transitioned from lying about the crowd size at Trump’s first inauguration to becoming a contestant on “Dancing with the Stars” at near lighting speed after only 182 days on the job.
Similarly, Stephanie Grisham held the job for 281 days before purportedly renouncing Trump and becoming a panelist on “The View.”
And, of course, Kayleigh McEnany went from lying about COVID-19 to lying on Fox News as a commentator after 288 days as Trump’s press secretary.
What most of Trump’s press secretaries have in common—other than Huckabee Sanders, who is now a politician—is that they come from media backgrounds and have since returned to working in media.
Leavitt, specifically, has a track record that’s more aligned with MAGA than a typical party operative like the other press secretaries. Leavitt graduated from college in 2019, years after Trump had fully taken over the party. She immediately interned at the White House before becoming an assistant press secretary in 2020—meaning her first job in politics was directly in service of Trump.
Related | 11 times Karoline Leavitt earned her ‘propaganda princess’ nickname
After Trump lost reelection, Leavitt briefly worked for GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, but by 2021, she was knee-deep in MAGA politics again.
She ran as a congressional candidate in New Hampshire, where she wore her Trump loyalism proudly. During that campaign, she said that she believed the conspiracy theory that Trump had actually won the 2020 election and attacked her Republican rival for insufficiently believing the election lie.
Leavitt won the Republican nomination but was trounced by Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas by nearly 10 percentage points in the general election. But Leavitt soon found herself in another Trump-adjacent position—training candidates under the Project 2025 framework.
Having proven how much in thrall she was to Trump and his worldview, it isn’t surprising that Leavitt was back in the White House early last year. And after just a few days on the job, Leavitt proved capable of making up absurdist lies.
Justifying a spending freeze put in place by Trump, Leavitt claimed that $50 million in taxpayer dollars “went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” The story was a complete fabrication but was amplified by Trump sycophants like racist billionaire Elon Musk.
When Leavitt isn’t making up stories on Trump’s behalf, she’s using her taxpayer-funded position to insult the press, Democrats, and anyone who dares to cross Trump. Leavitt’s style is essentially a ripoff of “Mean Girls” character Regina George, but instead of bullying teenage girls, she’s terrorizing an entire country.
In her position, Leavitt has claimed that events witnessed by millions of people and recorded for posterity—like when Trump mixed up Greenland and Iceland multiple times—simply did not happen.
This is precisely the type of shamelessness that Trump cherishes, it’s why he kept Huckabee Sanders around for so long, and it’s most likely the secret behind Leavitt’s “success.”
But of course, because this is Trump, he’s been extremely creepy and sexist about it. On his social media account, Trump repeatedly promoted a parody account that encouraged followers to rate Leavitt’s butt.
“That face … and those lips, they move like a machine gun,” Trump said of Leavitt in October.
Trump’s second term is everything that Americans hated about his first—but with increased intensity. Like her MAGA predecessors, Leavitt lies with abandon, shills for Trump, and attacks his enemies.
She just does it more—and that’s why she’s still around.
