Karoline Leavitt is resigning as White House press secretary at the end of August after 18 months in the job.
Trump announced the departure Wednesday in a post on Truth Social, calling Leavitt one of his most trusted aides and saying she was stepping away to spend more time with her young children. Leavitt confirmed it herself in a long post on X, describing the choice as bittersweet and saying she has felt since returning from the birth of her daughter that she cannot be the best mom her two children deserve while giving the job the constant time, energy and attention it requires.
Karoline Leavitt will not be leaving Trump’s orbit. He said she will become one of his top outside advisors and an influential voice in the Republican Party heading into the midterms, the elections held halfway through a presidential term that decide control of Congress. Leavitt echoed that in her own statement, saying she will keep advising him from the outside and remain a vocal advocate for MAGA and the party. She added that her fight is entering a new phase rather than ending.
No successor has been named. Trump did not float a candidate in his announcement and has not named one since. When Leavitt was out on leave in May after giving birth to her daughter on May 1, various Cabinet secretaries rotated in to handle briefings rather than a designated deputy stepping up, which is not how a press operation with a deep bench typically runs.
CNN reported an additional detail about that leave. Karoline Leavitt took roughly a month away from the White House, and during that month Trump called her often and at times asked when she planned to come back. She has not publicly complained about those calls and is not framing her exit as a grievance.
The timing puts pressure on the administration. Leavitt exits with less than three months until voters go to the polls, at a moment when Trump is carrying weak approval numbers, an ongoing war with Iran, and gas prices people are feeling every week. The press secretary is the person who runs the administration’s daily public messaging, and that seat will be turning over during the final stretch of a national election cycle.
Karoline Leavitt was 27 when she took the podium, which made her the youngest White House press secretary in American history. She is 28 now. She leaves as the second longest serving press secretary Trump has ever had, behind Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who lasted just under two years in his first term and is now the governor of Arkansas. The rest of the list is short. Kayleigh McEnany lasted eight months. Stephanie Grisham lasted 10 and never held a single briefing. Sean Spicer lasted six.
The wider press shop has been churning as well. Taylor Budowich, who ran communications as a deputy chief of staff, left after eight months. Two of Leavitt’s own deputies, Harrison Fields and Abigail Jackson, are also gone. Access has tightened alongside the turnover. Until last October, reporters could walk into the section of the West Wing known as upper press, where the press secretary and senior communications staff work, and ask questions face to face. Now they need an appointment.
Karoline Leavitt also briefed the room less often than the people who held the job before her. Much of her work happened on Fox News and other conservative outlets rather than at the podium, where she was frequently combative with reporters and accused mainstream outlets of bias. She defended the administration across the board, including Trump’s continued false claim that he won the 2020 election.
Her path to that podium started in Trump’s first administration in 2020, where she worked in the press office and left shortly before the term ended. In 2022 she ran for Congress in her home state of New Hampshire, beat a Republican primary field of nine other candidates, and lost the general election to Democrat Chris Pappas. From there she went to MAGA Inc, a super PAC, meaning a political fundraising group that can raise unlimited money to support a candidate as long as it does not coordinate directly with that candidate’s campaign. Then she joined Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Trump closed his announcement by calling Karoline Leavitt one of the best press secretaries in the history of the office and thanking her for a job well done. Whoever replaces her inherits a press operation that has lost three senior communications staffers in under a year, a briefing room that meets less often than it used to, and an election in November.
