This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 13 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Something is happening in the Trump administration that I have kind of been dying to weigh in on. This week, Karoline Leavitt announced that she is officially leaving the White House and will step down as press secretary at the end of August.
Now, there is a lot to say about her time in the briefing room, her role in the Trump era and her departure. But let’s start with what is not problematic about Leavitt leaving the White House.
More than a few armchair critics out there have gone after her for leaving the job just 19 months into President Donald Trump’s second term and saying she wants to spend more time with her family after the birth of her second child.
As press secretary, your job is to serve the public on behalf of the president.
I have plenty of issues with how Leavitt has done this job, but let me say at the outset: That is not one of them. It is really hard to have a baby while serving in a senior White House job; there are, unfortunately, not hundreds or even dozens of examples from the past to model your experience on, including how long to stay.
I was six months pregnant when I returned to the White House to serve as President Barack Obama’s communications director. My kids were 2 and 5 when I went to work for President Joe Biden as his press secretary. And that’s a big part of why I stayed in that job for only 15 months. So in my opinion, that’s not where criticism of Leavitt should focus.
There are, however, plenty of other things that need to be said about her tenure and about the damage I believe she did to a job I was honored to hold.
For one thing, there is the fundamental question of how she saw the role.
During a press secretary’s first briefing, they typically lay out how they view the job, or they are asked about it. During mine, I talked about what I saw as a “common goal” between the administration and the press, which was “sharing accurate information with the American people.”
I spoke with the president before making those comments, and I put it that way because that is essentially what the job is. Yes, you speak on behalf of the president, but you also deliver, to the best of your ability, accurate information to the American public.
Does every press secretary screw up from time to time? Sure. I did. Are there days when you don’t have all the information you need to answer every single question? Of course. But every day, your North Star should be providing information about what the president is doing, how he is trying to make people’s lives better and how the government is responding to whatever crisis is unfolding at that moment. Your job is to serve the public on behalf of the president.
It is clear that Leavitt saw the job differently. On her first day, she delivered this message:
I commit to telling the truth from this podium every single day. I commit to speaking on behalf of the president of the United States. That is my job. And I will say it’s very easy to speak truth from this podium when you have a president who is implementing policies that are wildly popular with the American people, and that’s exactly what this administration is doing.
Leavitt told the American people it was “very easy” to tell the truth about Trump because he was pursuing such popular policies, just one week after he kicked off his presidency by pardoning more than 1,000 Jan. 6 rioters.
But under this administration, Leavitt’s job has never seemed to be about serving as a purveyor of truthful information or answering tough questions. It has been about delivering the version of events preferred by the serial liar sitting in the Oval Office.
The reporters in the room don’t matter. The American people who rely on those reporters to find out what their government is doing don’t matter. Leavitt has never appeared to see herself as a public servant working for the American people. She has acted as though she works for one man.
Much like Attorney General Todd Blanche, who acts as though he is still the president’s personal attorney, Leavitt has spent the past 19 months putting Trump’s personal interests ahead of the professional obligations of the office she holds.
That has meant lying to the public for Trump’s benefit whenever and wherever she can, even about absolutely absurd things.
Take the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Leavitt repeated Trump’s lies about vandalism and said “deranged individuals, many of them longtime donors to the Democrat Party, to Barack Obama, to ActBlue” were responsible for damage to the monument.
But that wasn’t true. And we know it wasn’t true because the Trump administration admitted in court that its own shoddy contractor caused the damage to the reflecting pool.
Or take Trump’s ballroom project. Leavitt said its budget was $300 million and that it wouldn’t cost American taxpayers “a dime.”
Also not true. Reporting has since shown that the ballroom will cost far more than $300 million and that a significant portion of the bill will be footed by taxpayers. Contractor estimates obtained by The Washington Post put the cost at no less than $600 million, with more than half coming from taxpayers.
And who could forget the time she tried to explain away the weird discoloration and bandages on Trump’s hands by saying they were the result of vigorous handshaking?
Leavitt did not want to engage in good faith with those reporters or their tough questions. Instead, she did everything she could to reshape the briefing room.
When she couldn’t dismiss reporters’ questions, Leavitt often resorted to picking fights with the people asking them. In the wake of the fatal shooting of Renee Good by a U.S. immigration enforcement officer in Minneapolis, she lashed out at a reporter who questioned the government’s actions, calling him a “left-wing hack” and saying he “shouldn’t even be sitting” in the briefing room.
Don’t get me wrong: The relationship between the press and the White House is supposed to be adversarial by design. Reporters in that room are supposed to push for more access and more information. They are supposed to ask questions the White House would rather not answer.
But Leavitt did not want to engage in good faith with those reporters or with their tough questions. Instead, she did everything she could to reshape the briefing room into a kind of political safe space where she rarely had to face sustained scrutiny.
She typically briefed only once or twice a week. During those briefings, she sometimes simply yelled at the reporters in the room while, over time, filling that room with increasingly friendly MAGA voices.
She began each briefing with a question from what she called the “new media seat,” giving MAGA podcasters and other sympathetic outlets access to the briefing as members of the press. The result was that even during periods when there surely were more pressing issues facing the American people, Leavitt instead received questions about the president’s diet or his fitness routine.
But reshaping the briefing room has consequences beyond just irritating the press. That room is supposed to be a place where the American people get answers about what their government is doing. And when an administration stops taking that responsibility seriously, it isn’t the reporters who ultimately pay the price. It’s the American people.
Allison Detzel contributed.
The post As Karoline Leavitt leaves, I have thoughts as a former White House press secretary appeared first on MS NOW.
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