Background and career
Karoline Claire Leavitt (, LEV-it; born August 24, 1997) is an American political spokesperson who served as the 36th White House press secretary from 2025 to 2026. A member of the Republican Party, she was the party's nominee in the 2022 election for New Hampshire's 1st congressional district. Leavitt studied politics and communication at Saint Anselm College, graduating in 2019. She interned in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence and later became its associate director. In June 2020, Leavitt became an assistant White House press secretary. After Donald Trump's loss in the 2020 presidential election, she became a communications director for New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. In July 2021, Leavitt announced her campaign for the United States House of Representatives election for New Hampshire's first congressional district. She established herself as a pro-Trump candidate. Leavitt won the Republican primary, but lost to Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas. She served as a spokeswoman for MAGA Inc., Trump's super PAC, and became the press secretary for his 2024 presidential campaign. In November 2024, President-elect Trump named Leavitt as his White House press secretary. She is the youngest person to hold the position in U.S. history, as well as the first member of Generation Z in the position. In August 2026, Trump announced that Leavitt would resign as the White House press secretary.
Karoline Claire Leavitt was born on August 24, 1997, in Atkinson, New Hampshire. She was the third and youngest child of Bob and Erin Leavitt. Her family owned an ice cream stand in Atkinson and her father owned a used truck dealership in Plaistow. Leavitt attended Central Catholic High School, a private Catholic school in Lawrence, Massachusetts. She played softball and was named an Eagle-Tribune All-Star in 2014 and 2015. In interviews, she has credited her Catholic education as formative for her spirituality and instilling her with certain mores, including faith, family, discipline, the importance of public service, and an anti-abortion stance. Leavitt began attending Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, in 2015, where she received a scholarship to play softball and majored in communications and minored in political science. She interned with NBC Sports Boston but later shifted toward political journalism. Leavitt became involved with the New Hampshire Institute of Politics in her sophomore year; as the institute's ambassador, she interned for a United States senator and the television station WMUR. By the end of her sophomore year, she had given up softball. Leavitt applied for an internship at Fox News, but later interned as a writer for the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence writing letters and notes on behalf of the president. Leavitt founded Saint Anselm's broadcasting club and wrote for its paper, the Saint Anselm Crier. She later described herself as the "token conservative" on campus, and her writings reflected a conservative viewpoint. In a 2016 opinion piece for the Crier, she wrote that the media was "frankly crooked" and "unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false". For one semester, Leavitt studied at John Cabot University in Rome. She graduated in 2019, becoming the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college.
After graduating, Leavitt was offered a full-time job in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence responding to letters sent to president Donald Trump; by June 2020, she was its associate director. That month, she was named as an assistant White House press secretary after a friend who was a personal aide to the president referred her to the press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany. She attended an event in the White House Rose Garden that later served as the beginning of the White House COVID-19 outbreak; Leavitt later tested positive for the virus. In January 2021, weeks before Trump left office, she became the communications director for New York representative Elise Stefanik.
On July 19, 2021, Leavitt announced her intention to run in the United States House of Representatives election for New Hampshire's first congressional district as a Republican in an interview with WMUR. She said she was encouraged to run after President Joe Biden reversed many of the policies enacted by his predecessor, Donald Trump, and after Twitter erroneously suspended her account while she was working for Stefanik. Within three days, her campaign had raised $100,000. Leavitt's campaign largely leveraged her experience within the Trump administration, as she sought to be viewed as the most pro-Trump candidate in the Republican primary. She officially filed to run in June 2022. Polling in August placed Leavitt second behind Matt Mowers, who had been the Republican nominee in the 2020 House of Representatives election. Leading up to the primary, Leavitt criticized Mowers as insufficiently pro-Trump, including noting that he was a former advisor to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie. The dichotomy in Leavitt's firebrand approach and Mowers's tempered strategy demonstrated a divide in the Republican Party, according to The New York Times; Leavitt received endorsements from Texas senator Ted Cruz and representatives Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, and Stefanik, in a demonstration of support from Republican lawmakers. She concluded her campaign with a gun shoot at a fish and game club. Leavitt won the Republican primary in September. At 25, she was the second member of Generation Z to win a House primary and the first Republican to do so, after Democrat Maxwell Frost won his Florida primary the previous month. She was defeated by Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas. In 2022, Leavitt faced a Federal Election Commission complaint from End Citizens United alleging that her campaign and treasurer had illegally accepted campaign donations over the legal limit and had never repaid her donors. In January 2025, Leavitt disclosed in 17 amended campaign filings $326,370 in unpaid campaign debts she had failed to disclose for several years. Roughly $200,000 of the debt had been composed of illicit campaign donations made in excess of campaign finance limits she had never paid back, in violation of campaign finance laws.
After losing to Pappas, Leavitt began working for MAGA Inc., Trump's super PAC. She was featured in a video produced for Project 2025, a political initiative to prepare for a Republican presidency, training political appointees on how to counter the federal bureaucracy. Leavitt began working for Trump's 2024 presidential campaign in January 2024 as his national press secretary.
On November 15, 2024, president-elect Trump named Leavitt as his White House press secretary. She is the youngest White House press secretary in history. She was given a smaller office in the West Wing in comparison to her predecessors, with the office reserved for press secretaries instead being occupied by Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel. Leavitt gave her first press conference on January 28, 2025, beginning the briefing by seeking to elevate non-traditional media. During the press conference, she falsely said that $50 million in taxpayer dollars had been intended for use in funding condoms in the Gaza Strip. Reporters indicated that the erroneous claim appears to originate from the government initiative DOGE misinterpreting a grant to prevent the spread of HIV in Gaza Province, Mozambique. Her tenure was marked by a separation from precedent, particularly with non-traditional media. In February, Leavitt announced that the White House would select who participated in the presidential press pool. That month, she said that "new voices are going to be welcomed" alongside traditional media. The following month, Axios reported that the White House sought to change the seating chart for reporters, potentially by appointing Leavitt as president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Leavitt was named as a defendant in Associated Press v. Budowich (2025), a lawsuit that began after Trump's staff moved to block the Associated Press from certain press events over the Gulf of Mexico–America naming dispute. According to the lawsuit, Leavitt told Zeke Miller, the chief White House correspondent for the Associated Press, that the organization would be barred from certain areas of the White House unless it referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America". In her tenure as press secretary, White House briefings began to reflect Trump's conflict with the news media. According to an analysis by The New York Times in April 2025, Leavitt called on individuals standing on the perimeters of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room—a collection of reporters from The Gateway Pundit, Real America's Voice, One America News Network, The Daily Signal, LindellTV, The Daily Wire, and Turning Point USA—approximately a quarter of the time. Leavitt additionally added a "new media" seat in January, calling on its occupants first in every briefing; the journalists sitting in the seat were primarily from right-wing media outlets and online news publications.
