Karoline Leavitt, at just 28 years old, has reclaimed the traditional White House press secretary’s office—a room steeped in history, just down the hall from the Oval Office, with its fireplace and coveted view of the north driveway. But her return to this storied space isn’t just about office real estate or status in Washington’s power hierarchy. It’s a symbol of the seismic shift in how the White House communicates with the American public under Donald Trump’s second term—a shift that has left many observers deeply unsettled.
According to CBS News, Leavitt took back the press secretary’s office on October 1, 2025, following the departure of Taylor Budowich, who had been serving as President Trump’s deputy chief of staff for communications and cabinet affairs. Leavitt’s move marks a return to tradition in one sense: press secretaries from Trump’s first term, including Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany, all occupied the same office. But in another sense, her tenure is anything but traditional.
Leavitt’s rise to the podium was meteoric. She previously served as Trump’s 2024 campaign press secretary and worked in the White House press office during his first term. Her appointment in January 2025 made her the youngest person ever to hold the role. Yet, as PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have documented, her approach to the job has shattered longstanding norms, turning the White House briefing room into what critics call a “propaganda machine” for the president’s most combative narratives.
Historically, the White House press secretary has walked a tightrope, balancing the dual obligations of representing the administration and providing the public with credible, if sometimes spun, information. From Ron Ziegler during Watergate to Jay Carney under Obama and Jen Psaki for Biden, the role has always come with tension—but also with an unwritten rule: acknowledge facts, even when spinning them. Leavitt, however, is accused of obliterating that line.
Take, for example, her now-infamous statement from March 11, 2025: “Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.” According to PolitiFact, this claim is flatly false. Tariffs are taxes on imports, and the costs typically get passed on to U.S. businesses and consumers. The result? Higher prices for everyday Americans, not a tax cut. Economists outside the Trump administration called the statement “nonsensical,” but Leavitt doubled down, repeating the claim multiple times in briefings. The move was not a slip of the tongue; it was, as many see it, a deliberate inversion of reality designed to recast rising costs as savings.
Leavitt’s pattern of making misleading or outright false statements began on her very first day as press secretary. On January 28, 2025, she claimed that U.S. aid included “$50 million to fund condoms in Gaza.” There was no such funding, as PolitiFact and Reuters quickly confirmed. The claim was entirely fabricated, yet it served its purpose: to frame humanitarian aid as wasteful and attack Democrats as out of touch. The same day, she made a half-true assertion that USDA-ordered mass chicken culls were the sole cause of egg shortages—a narrative that oversimplified a complex situation involving avian flu and market factors.
Another flashpoint came in May 2025, when Leavitt declared that a sprawling tax-and-spending bill “does not add to the deficit.” Nonpartisan analysts projected trillions in new debt over the next decade, and independent reviews labeled her statement false. Yet Leavitt’s job, it seemed, was not to interpret the numbers but to bury them beneath a blizzard of talking points.
The government shutdown in the fall of 2025 provided another example of Leavitt’s approach. She insisted that Democrats were holding the budget hostage to give “illegal immigrants free health care.” In reality, as FactCheck.org reported, Democrats were pushing to restore Affordable Care Act coverage for certain legally present immigrants—not to extend free health care to undocumented individuals. Still, Leavitt’s framing weaponized the immigration debate, fanning fears and distracting from the actual policy dispute at hand.
On matters of accountability, Leavitt has been equally evasive. When asked on July 17, 2025, whether President Trump would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Jeffrey Epstein case, she responded that the president “would not recommend” one, echoing Trump’s own dismissive stance. She parroted the Department of Justice’s line that there was no “client list” and no reason to revisit the case, reinforcing the administration’s refusal to pursue further scrutiny.
Critics argue that Leavitt’s tenure marks a dangerous departure from the press secretary’s traditional role as a conduit for both the administration and the public. By treating the podium as a “propaganda pulpit,” as one commentator put it, she has eroded the fragile trust between citizens and their government. Every time Leavitt delivers an outright falsehood—whether about tariffs, shutdowns, or the deficit—she chips away at the credibility of the White House and, by extension, the democratic institutions it represents.
“Karoline Leavitt does not work for Donald Trump. She works for the American people,” one critic wrote, emphasizing that the press secretary’s true employers are the taxpayers who fund her salary and expect honesty in return. Instead, Leavitt has been accused of treating the public as an adversary to be manipulated, rather than an employer to be served. Her loyalty, critics say, is upward—to Trump—not outward to the country.
Supporters of the administration see things differently. They argue that Leavitt is simply defending the president’s agenda against a hostile media and a political opposition eager to undermine Trump’s second term. They point to her youth and loyalty as assets, not liabilities, and claim that accusations of dishonesty are themselves politically motivated. But for many observers, the sheer volume and brazenness of Leavitt’s falsehoods set her apart from her predecessors—and not in a good way.
Inside the West Wing, the return to the traditional press secretary’s office is more than a matter of space. It’s a signal that Leavitt, working alongside communications director Steven Cheung, is consolidating her role as the administration’s chief messenger. With Budowich’s departure, Leavitt has taken on additional duties, further cementing her influence in Trump’s inner circle. White House spokespeople declined to comment on the office reshuffle, but the symbolism is hard to miss.
In the end, Karoline Leavitt’s legacy may be defined less by her age or her proximity to the Oval Office than by her willingness to bend, twist, and sometimes break the truth in service of her boss. In a White House where retaliation and loyalty are prized above candor and transparency, she has become the face of a new era in political communication—one where the line between information and propaganda is not just blurred, but erased.
For many, Leavitt’s tenure is a cautionary tale about the fragility of trust in government and the perils of treating honesty as expendable. As she settles into her fireplace-adorned office, the question lingers: What happens to democracy when the people’s podium becomes the president’s megaphone?