The White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was praised on the NY Post's “Pod Force One” by Miranda Devine on Tuesday, for ruling the briefing room with “an iron fist.”
“I try, thank you,” Leavitt replied. “I prepare a lot for the briefings, and I walk in there with a good grip on what they’re going to ask, because I read and I watch and I prepare all day, all morning."
Leavitt, 28, is the youngest person ever to serve as White House Press Secretary. She’s already built a reputation for being combative and unapologetically snarky with left-wing mainstream media reporters, most notably replying to an inquiry from a reporter from the Huffington Post with, "Your mom."
“The press briefing room can be combative, and sometimes it is behind the scenes as well, but I tell our team that we need to be professional and get them facts, and nobody does that better than President Trump,” she said. “We will also work with good journalists who want to write good stories and try to make those stories as accurate as possible.”
The White House has moved to tighten its grip on the press, even taking control of the White House pool reporter rotation away from the White House Correspondents’ Association. Journalists in that pool are granted closer access to the president and are responsible for relaying notes and updates to the rest of the press corps; they traditionally receive that access on a rotating basis.
The Trump administration, towards the end of October, also clamped down on reporters roaming up to the Upper Press area, where Leavitt and the rest of the White House communications team work. Reporters now have to make appointments to get into the Upper Press. While the mainstream media has portrayed the move as restricting the press's First Amendment privileges, Leavitt revealed that reporters are privately okay with the change as long as they still have access to appointments.
“What was happening up here is now that we have taken over the responsibilities of the National Security Council, thanks to the restructuring of Secretary Rubio when he became national security advisor,” Leavitt explained. “So we felt it became very inappropriate for reporters to be loitering around sensitive information in our offices. And we did, unfortunately, catch some unruly reporters recording us without our permission, listening in on our conversations, eavesdropping.”
“We grant them that access,” she continued. “I give them as much time as I possibly can on my schedule, although a lot of my time is with the president and in the Oval Office and sitting in on meetings.”
Leavitt told Devine that the press has a far more respectful relationship with President Trump in his second term than they did during his first. One can't help but think that has much to do with Leavitt.
“I think that November 5th was a huge wake-up call for so many reporters in the mainstream media class. If you notice, their interactions with the president and with myself are far different than they were in his first term with my predecessors,” she said. “I think they realized that maybe there’s something to this guy. If 70 million Americans elected him, not once, but twice, maybe we should have a little bit more respect and treat this administration with a little more decency.”
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
Help us continue to report on President Trump's successes. Join Townhall VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member