The life of Karoline Leavitt

When Karoline Leavitt, the buxom blonde 27-year-old White House press secretary landed the gig, not everybody was convinced. Scott Jennings, the Bush speechwriter turned TV star, had the resume. Megyn Kelly had the fire. But Leavitt? She was a gamble, at best.

But Donald Trump wasn’t concerned about her youth and inexperience. “When I was 21, I was building buildings in Manhattan,” he told her. “I believe you can have this job.” He has been vindicated. Since taking the podium, Leavitt has quieted some of her detractors with a performance that’s part combat sport, part masterclass in messaging.

Like her boss, she is combative and spunky. Sometimes she mocks the legacy news reporters she feels are asking particularly bad questions. Sometimes she kicks them out of the briefing room altogether. Yet even journalists who have felt her verbal jabs have to admit she’s a serious media talent – eloquent, concise and never flustered.

“Trump is a divisive person,” says Neil Levesque, Leavitt’s former mentor at Saint Anselm, a small Catholic college with some 2,000 students in the political battleground of Manchester, New Hampshire. “But Karoline’s competence, her positivity, it’s bringing new people to watch her press conferences, who wouldn’t usually be interested in politics.

“I drive to my long-time mechanic, the door goes up and I drive in to get my oil changed. Three guys are there with grease all over them. I step out of the car and they all say, in unison, ‘we want to meet Karoline Leavitt.’ Half an hour later, I get a call from my 60-year-old brother-in-law who works at a concrete company. ‘I am just so impressed with Karoline Leavitt,’ he says. ‘I just think she’s awesome.’ Now these are people that normally don’t really tune in to politics. So what’s going on with that? What’s the secret sauce?”

According to friends and co-workers, the secret of Leavitt’s rise is her self-confidence. Leavitt was pregnant when she took the job as President Trump’s campaign press secretary, signing up to spend her entire pregnancy and postpartum period in a high-stress role with frequent travel – a job that could have, if Trump were to have lost, gotten her nowhere.

“That’s politics,” she says, when asked. She has also said privately that if the campaign hadn’t ended in success, her next move would have been in communications in the private sector. Those close to her don’t believe that. “If Trump had lost,” one friend told me, “and by the way, I think in her heart she never believed Trump was going to lose – but if he did, she never would have exited from the fight. She just has too much of a fighter spirit in her, too much of a sparkle in her eye to go quietly into the night.”

In 2022, when Leavitt ran for Congress in her home state of New Hampshire, internal polls showed that she was down in Manchester. During a meeting where her team deliberated about what to do, Leavitt said she was just going to knock on every Republican primary voter’s door – which she did.

She ended up losing by only a fraction of a point, when internal polls projected it would be a landslide loss – with just 7 percent of Manchester voters saying they would support her.

When she lost the election to her Democrat opponent Chris Pappas, her team sat around, devastated. Leavitt walked in and said: “I enjoyed it. It was a great experience. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people, got a lot of new perspectives and I don’t regret a single thing. And, well, we’ll see what happens tomorrow.” One of her campaign team says: “Imagine you’re a bunch of kids on the playground and each kid falls and scrubs his knee on the ground. We’re all sitting there moping, wondering what happened. And she just got right up and said, ‘It happens, move on.’ That’s Karoline.”

Leavitt connects with average Americans because she is one, according to her friends. As a child she learned about inflation when the price of milk shot up, affecting her family’s ice cream shop in her hometown of Atkinson, New Hampshire. Leavitt’s dad tells friends that, at 14, she was pretty much running the family ice cream shop herself. Her type-A personality meant that she was good at organization, as well as making and executing a plan.

It came as a surprise to nobody in Leavitt’s life when, less than ten years later, she began working for the first Trump administration straight out of college – first as a presidential speechwriter, then assistant press secretary to Kayleigh McEnany.

“She was always insatiable,” says Levesque. “Even when she was a student, she worked harder than anyone did. As well as taking tough classes, she was interning in the Senate and working at the local television station as a producer.”

Leavitt decided that Saint Anselm needed its own broadcast network, which she would anchor. Levesque says: “She wanted to be able to communicate with the campus as a whole about upcoming events and things that were happening.” Amid her familiarly chirpy broadcasts about campus sports and local news, she used the time to celebrate the successes of Trump’s first term.

Since her school broadcasting days, she has learned to speak Trump fluently. Now, as the youngest White House press secretary in history, she has become one of his closest confidantes. Before every press conference, she chats to the President in the Oval Office. On her short walk to the press briefing room, she works out how to reiterate (or translate) what he’s said to the public.

In contrast to her predecessors, she refuses to carry a binder of notes. She says she “felt it was better just to obtain the knowledge first-hand and have it in my brain ready to go.” Between grueling media sessions, she also gathers her team to pray. “She asks God for confidence, for the ability to articulate her words,” per the Washington Post. She also privately thanks Joe Biden for making her relationship with Trump appear seamless: during Biden’s tenure, he was holed up in his bedroom hiding from Karine Jean-Pierre, who apparently didn’t show up to work until noon.

In Leavitt’s mind, President Trump’s communication flows openly and honestly through her – and through Truth Social. Leavitt wakes up at 5 a.m. and enters the White House at 7.30, often leaving more than 12 hours later. Her dedication to her work is quite remarkable, given that she popped out a child just four days before she returned to the office on July 14.

The night before, Leavitt was on maternity leave from her role as Trump’s campaign spokeswoman. She was watching television when she saw a bullet clip Trump’s ear. She simply turned to her husband and said, “looks like I’m going back.” That level of dedication helped propel her toward the job she has today.

Leavitt’s husband Nicholas Riccio, who is 32 years her senior, is often seen bringing their baby, Niko, to the White House, which he and Leavitt decided they would do whenever she knows she’s in for a long day or has to front primetime hits. Though Leavitt’s circle says she is still the same girl she’s always been, in some ways she has changed a lot over the past few months. Being press secretary has made her an introvert – only leaving the house for work – which nobody would have described her as previously. Before taking the job one of her predecessors, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, sat her down and gave her a stark warning: that the role of press secretary was unlike any other White House job and that her life would change irreversibly overnight.

Leavitt, on some level, knew this, but didn’t quite understand the degree to which Sanders was right. The security and privacy issues that have come along have been a big adjustment for the family, particularly Leavitt’s husband, who is a successful real-estate developer. She longs for the days that her family could step out the door without security and privacy concerns. More than anything else, she wishes she could go and buy a chocolate ice cream with her husband and son without being bothered.

Leavitt believes strongly that the unconventional President won because of his embrace of non-traditional media, and as press secretary she has been eager to treat podcasters and independent journalists the same as those from the big networks.

“Trumpworld embraces disruption, and we sink or swim,” one official confides, with a grin. “This is why we’re bringing a new world to the White House, in the form of independent journalists and influencers.”

Leavitt might be orchestrating this press-room revolution with Gen Z swagger. But her on-camera magic springs from something deliciously contradictory – a young face projecting an old-school sensibility which speaks directly to Middle America.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.