In this conversation…
Six years and five Trump press secretaries ago, The Guardian reported that, thanks to Trump’s ceaseless tweeting, the press secretary position had become “redundant,” an anachronism from a quainter era of politics when presidents didn’t preside like mad kings over their own social media platforms. So what should we make of Karoline Leavitt and the role she’s performing in this political theater?
References in This Episode
Karoline Leavitt has been a prominent fixture in the Trump administration’s media landscape, inventing increasingly creative defenses for our nation’s rapid backslide into authoritarianism. So when running influencer Kate Mackz posted—then deleted—then reposted this puff piece about Blackshirt Barbie, the internet joined hands in a Midsommar flower-crown circle and chanted a collective what the fuck
And if you felt like that clip dragged on for hours, just wait until you hear the accompanying 27-minute podcast episode in which Karoline recycles her favorite talking points: “small business family,” “literally applying on whitehouse.gov,” being “the youngest fascist in history”1
But maybe that wasn’t quite enough Kontent for you—fear not, Megyn Kelly sat down with our fearless Sanewasher in Chief to shadowbox with their favored Big Bad Opponent, aka, every media outlet that isn’t Fox News
The better reporting on Leavitt comes from local New Hampshire reporting, like this 2022 article about her time at St. Anselm, a Benedictine Catholic college which she attended (at first) on a softball scholarship2
Unfortunately for us, she discovered her passion for “the media and politics” and quit the softball team to publish deeply reported bangers in the school newspaper like this one and this one, in which she alternately (a) complains about “the liberal media” and (b) her “liberal professors.” A star is born.
The problem with newspaper publishing is that it can be slow and hard to sensationalize. No matter! After a brief stint as a “student journalist,” Karoline started the broadcasting club where she could both control and speed up the news cycle. Enjoy this early 2017 broadcast in which she says, and I quote, “And, I mean, everyone can expect the trans—the peaceful transfer of power—in this country. That’s what makes America so great.”3
After being offered a job at a Manchester ABC affiliate called WMUR, she left behind her craft of broadcast journalism and took an internship in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building mailroom ventriloquizing the president in greeting cards, which she somehow managed, impressively, to leverage in order to get her résumé to Trump’s fifth press secretary Kayleigh4 McEnany via one of the President’s “body men” she had befriended, whatever the fuck that means
It’s about time for a Fun Fakt: Karoline was with Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman she worked for after Trump I, in the Capitol on January 6 during a decidedly unpeaceful transfer of power. When asked about this experience by the Biased Fake News Media, she didn’t miss a beat hitting the “party of law and order” talking point
Next up: Her Kongressional Run, which she launches on Fox & Friends on a broadcast of women so utterly indistinguishable from one another I feared I was having a stroke, before going on an absolute Steve Bannon War Room press blitz (a dozen appearances! #grindset). Bannon later said her embrace of the disproven Stolen Election narrative in the aftermath of January 6 is how he knew she was, quote, “True MAGA.”5
Her media strategy nationalized her New Hampshire to get “$1,000 checks from middle-aged white guys across the country” so effectively that she ended up raising $3.8 million, more than double the amount her GOP consultant told her she’d need to be competitive in a crowded race of 10 GOP candidates. This reporting from Adam Wren for Politico was the best I found on Karoline’s political education.
But her nine Republican opponents weren’t so accepting of her—unfortunately for them, the notorious “hoebag ad” smear campaign they launched against her backfired, and—against all odds—she won her primary with some genuinely impressive (game recognize game) footsoldiering.6
There’s just one small issue: Some local New Hampshire reporting broke the story that Karoline still owes $325,000 to donors who gave to her campaign above the legal limit. The Federal Election Commission has sent her thirteen letters over the past two years pointing out that she needs to pay back this money, and as far as I can tell her strategy is just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
She doesn’t bring up the details of this experience much now, but back in 2023 she sat down with Alex Clark, MAHA Queen and Charlie Kirk’s Favored Cash Cow Babygurl, to explain how foundational the experience was for her political career. Her primary takeaway is telling: “Never apologize. Double down. Go on offense.”7
One other detail she dropped in the Alex Clark interview was that she scrubbed her social media after the hoebag ad, which means she saw these three pieces of undisclosed sponsored content from 2023 and was like, these are fine
The real gag is that Karoline is just the messenger for the rhetorical strategy of one Steven Cheung, a man who is, regrettably, fucking hysterical8 and puppeteering the media strategy that Trump II is using to great effect
“Cheung has now realized Bannon’s dream of weaponized comms, ushering in a new era of political messaging in Washington.” And wouldn’t you know his perspective on the art of doubling down sounds suspiciously similar to Karoline’s: “When times get tough, you don’t take a step back; you double down. And if that doesn’t work, you triple down.”
That’s why our favorite hungover sorority president can speak to the media and say, with a straight face, that “putting out statements daily” is tantamount to honesty—because in Cheung’s effective vision for attention capture, conflating speed and frequency with transparency and openness is par for the course
The weird thing about their communications strategy is its mystical element: the extent to which you get the sense they believe that if they lie forcefully enough, they’ll be able to shape reality to their will (and, more horrifyingly, how often this has worked for them)
And that brings us to what is, in my mind, the first comms misstep: Their intention of building a “new media landscape” by importing sycophantic influencers with all the desperate energy of a middle-aged man mail-ordering a bride to his exact specifications9
The problem with this strategy10 is that the MAGA Magic relies on a trollish, adversarial relationship with the media, and sucking Karoline’s dick for three days in a row does not sensational content make
After all, the far right loves Karoline specifically because she’s “bold” and “gutsy” and “triggers the libs”—directly from the horse’s11 mouth
But there are real consequences for the administration’s incompetence, like that which you can learn about by reading the very first page of KRISTI NOEM, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, ET AL. v. KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA, ET AL., in which “The United States represents that the removal to El Salvador was the result of an ‘administrative error,’” a situation which Karoline represents completely differently behind the podium, insisting that they’ve “proven” he’s a member of MS-13 (narrator: they have not)
And just when you thought the trolling couldn’t go any farther, I present to you: ✨Wellness influencer for Surgeon General✨
In conclusion, the Trump administration is politically trolling a population through increasingly cruel, sensationalist, and disturbing behavior12 with the explicit purpose of generating a reaction and ~owning the libs~, a dynamic which I am forced to ask: Would this stop working if people just straight up no longer attended press briefings? Can you starve the troll of attention so thoroughly it turns on itself? A girl can dream.
ok i made up the last one
if you’re wondering whether she ever parlays this factoid into a Joint Grift Slay with Riley Gaines, you’re *checks notes* correct!
citation needed, baby
i am unavailable to talk about how on-brand this spelling is. nominative determinism ftw
chilling lol
the AC/DC Thunderstruck walk-up song to the middle school band room stage sent me to another dimension
the federal election commission admin reading this being like oh ok so that’s why she’s not texting back got it
i mean like in his defense, ron desantis DID “cuck himself”
there is a LAYUP of a joke just waiting to be made here about her marriage to a 60-year-old man but i won’t make it, because this is a FeMiNiSt PodCaSt or whatever
don’t worry, the democrats tried it, too
and of course by “the horse” i mean the one and only rudy guiliani #neverforget
like Department of Homeland Security Content Creator Kristi Noem making prisoners strip for her Lara Croft tombraider TikTok shoot
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