How Karoline Leavitt Changed the White House Press Room

The new media seat was a good idea.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post after two years in order to spend more time with her young children. This is not a particularly surprising development: Press secretary appears to be a demanding job in any administration, and presidents are known to go through several of them. Former President Joe Biden had Jen Psaki and then Karine Jean-Pierre during his single term.

The job of the press secretary is to communicate the president's talking points while dodging, ducking, dipping, diving, and dodging (the five D's!) hostile lines of inquiry from the media. As such, it's a hard role to compliment. Leavitt was certainly an adept interlocutor and didn't seem to get tripped up nearly as frequently as Jean-Pierre, whose level of willful delusion about Biden's cognitive fitness reached staggering proportions.

Of course, Leavitt had her less-than-stellar moments, too. She once chewed out The Hill's Niall Stanage, my occasional Rising co-host, for giving his opinion on the shooting of Renee Good. This was intended as some great triumph over Stanage and the liberal media, and also proof of his bias, but Leavitt had asked him to give his opinion, so what was he supposed to do?

In fact, there are more opinions than ever before in the White House press briefing room. This is a positive aspect of the legacy Leavitt will leave behind: She opened up the press pool to nontraditional journalists from the alternate media and the world of podcasting by creating a designated "new media" seat. It was a good move that reflected both the changing nature of the media and the rise of influencers as a source of news about and support for the administration.

Not all occupants of the new media seat have raised worthwhile points, and supporters of independent media should press their favorite figures to actually ask tough questions rather than just engage in cheerleading for Trump or whomever succeeds him. But overall, the idea of expanding the circle was a good one: It is no longer the case that a handful of supposedly objective straight-news reporters representing major print and television companies are the only sources of information about what's happening in the White House.

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Worth Watching

I loved the third season finale of House of the Dragon! Finally, Rhaenyra—who is right about everything—is ready to do what it takes to win the war and crush the greens. I have more thoughts here:

Finally caught up on House of the Dragon, which improved itself significantly and offered a fairly satisfying finale. Rhaenyra's descent into "madness" (which I put in scare quotes because she's not particularly mad; on the contrary, she's completely justified in everything she… pic.twitter.com/QWlmjlxTgh

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) August 11, 2026