Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s charming press chief with a mean-girl glint

Illustration by Andy Bunday for The Observer

Karoline Claire Leavitt

Born 1997

Alma mater St Anselm College, New Hampshire

Occupation White House press secretary

Spouse Nicholas Riccio

Children One son

If you want to work for Donald Trump, you have to be loyal, unflappable and television-ready, with a look straight out of “central casting”. Being rich also counts. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, ticks every box.

She is a natural on Fox News. She looks hot – a “10”, sniped a woman talk show host, doubting her qualifications for the job. But Leavitt is a revelation. At 27, with a baby under one and a husband pushing 60, she has remarkable aplomb.

Steve Bannon calls her “tough as boot leather”. He predicts Leavitt will soon have his old White House job. “After she’s spokesman for a year or two, I think she’s going to get a cabinet position. Maybe chief of staff,” he told Politico.

Leavitt has whirred through a dizzying array of controversies without skipping a beat. Trump’s pause on tariffs? That’s just “the Art of the Deal,” she spinned. Replacing Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon? “Fake news.” The boiling hostility between federal axeman Elon Musk and Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser? “Boys will be boys,” she cooed.

Leavitt doesn’t rely on a thick sheaf of notes at White House briefings. “I want to just go in there and speak from my mind and from my heart,” she told the podcaster Megyn Kelly. Before every joust with journalists, she prays. “Lord Jesus, please give us the strength, the knowledge, the ability to articulate our words and have fun and be confident,” she said in a video posted on X.

Charming, but with a mean-girl glint, Leavitt regularly slaps down journalists who try to get the better of her. “It’s insulting you’re trying to test my knowledge of economics,” she jabbed at an AP reporter. Like her boss, she has no qualms about dispatching illegal immigrants to El Salvador’s mass jail for “terrorists” in defiance of the US courts. If she ever backs down, she never owns up to it.

Michael Wolff, Trumpworld’s bestselling chronicler, says, “The requirement for the press secretary is to be as aggressive and full of bile as any human being can be.” But, he admits, “She’s very likeable.” Members of Trump’s inner circle “diss everybody” but don’t have a bad word to say about her. “They’re kind of protective of her.”

Leavitt was in the first weeks of pregnancy when she was invited to join Trump’s 2024 campaign team. She felt obliged to tell Susie Wiles, now White House chief of staff, who brushed off her concerns. Leavitt didn’t let her down, running on Trump’s sleep schedule of four hours a night. Three days after giving birth, she had just returned home with son Niko when she turned on the television.

It was July 13, the day of the assassination attempt on Trump. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘Looks like I’m going back to work.’ ” She hasn’t stopped since. “I have legitimately done my make-up while nursing my baby, talking on the phone, prepping for my TV hit, all at the same time,” she told the Conservateur magazine.

In the White House briefing room, she has thrown open the doors to the MAGA ecosystem of “new media” podcasts, publications and influencers. Leavitt laps up all the sycophantic questions. “I can confirm the president is in very good shape,” she tittered when asked about Trump’s secret to looking “healthier than ever”.

This grates on the rather snooty “old” White House media but, having been starved of access to Joe Biden, it’s consoling to be back at the centre of the Trump whirligig. One reporter likens it to being in an “abusive relationship”. But Matthew Foldi, editor-in-chief of the MAGA-supporting Washington Reporter, regards the sparky and combative Leavitt as a “pro’s pro”.

“She has people in the room who despise her but it used to be much more of an echo chamber,” Foldi says. “Conservatives are way more comfortable in dealing with media who are not slavish to them … Nobody looks at her and says, ‘Oh, she’s 27 years old’.”

Neatly coiffed with long, Ivanka-blonde “Republican hair”, Leavitt dresses to impress at the podium in faux-Chanel boucle suits and Jimmy Choo pumps. She wears a gold cross pendant, a pink Gucci watch and carries a $2,000 Louis Vuitton tote. Self-Portrait, the London-based fashion house founded by Malaysian designer Han Chong, is a favourite label, offering “femininity ensured by elegant functionality”, according to its website.

“She always looks her best and glamorous. She is the full package,” says Monica Paige Luisi, White House correspondent for the ulra-conservative organisation, Turning Point USA. Most of all, she admires Leavitt’s ability to juggle work and family. “She does it with such poise and strength, it’s outstanding in the best way.”

Leavitt admits her life is “incredibly challenging, emotionally, physically, spiritually”. She sometimes gets pushback about her age-gap marriage and baby. “Yes, of course! It’s an atypical love story,” she said on Kelly’s podcast. But not from Trump. “He doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman with kids,” she told the Conservateur. “He just wants the hardest worker and the best person for the job.”

It helps that her husband, 59-year-old property developer Nicholas Riccio, is a multi-millionaire with flexible working hours. Leavitt’s mother, Erin, a yoga teacher, also dropped everything to enable her daughter to rush back to work. Young as she is, though, Leavitt’s professionalism comes from years of practice. In fact, she is a veteran of the first Trump administration.

Leavitt was born in 1997 in Atkinson, New Hampshire, where her father Bob owns a car and truck dealership. A high school athlete, she won a softball scholarship to St Anselm’s College, a Catholic university, to study journalism before engaging in politics.

After missing out on an internship with Fox News, Leavitt interned in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. In 2020 she joined White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany as assistant press secretary. When Trump lost the election, she worked for Elise Stefanik, a rising Republican congresswoman.

Truth-telling has never been Leavitt’s strongpoint: she earned her spurs with Trump by insisting Joe Biden stole the election. At 25, she became the youngest Republican to run for Congress in the 2022 midterm election s, beating 10 rivals in the New Hampshire primary (but losing the seat to the Democrats). This was when she met her husband, Riccio, who owned a restaurant that hosted one of her campaign stops. “He is my greatest supporter, he’s my best friend, and he’s my rock,” she gushed. Her diamond engagement ring cost an estimated $90,000. They married six months after Niko’s birth, only a few days before Trump’s inauguration in January.

Foldi describes Leavitt’s campaign as “the perfect preparation for being viciously attacked by journalists on a daily basis. You definitely grow up in real time”. White House press secretaries have a high burn-out rate. In 2016 Sean Spicer, Trump’s first, lasted only six months. Most move on to broadcasting gigs after leaving Trump’s orbit. Leavitt, Wolff predicts, “will go on Fox News. That’s the whole aspiration”.

But with a wealthy husband and experience of running for office, Leavitt could carve out her own lane in politics. When she is no longer her master’s voice, she may have a lot to say for herself.