Bye Bye Miss American Lie
The Career Arc: Ice Cream, Softball, Defeat, Disinformation. Next Stop: Fox News.
Karoline Leavitt leaves the White House at the end of the month, and the Trumpian accolades have already started to swirl in like a turd in the bowl. Youngest press secretary in history; twenty-seven when she took the job, and a mother of two who briefed the republic between deliveries. All true, sort of. Certainly the stuff she’ll put on her résumé because the unvarnished truth wouldn’t get her a job in a prison.
The job of a press secretary is simple. You stand between the public and the government and tell the truth about what the government is doing. That is the entire gig. Imagine if you can that in Trump 2.0 the job required someone more vile than Spicer, Huckabee-Sanders or Barbi McEnany. Ergo, Karoline with a K.: a woman with daddy issues, a knack for lying and a diamond cross.
This is the kind of person Donald Trump hired, watched work, and did not fire. He adored her and that’s telling on a variety of levels. She is a liar in service to Trump. She has aided and abetted him lying to America and the world as he has caused calamity and mayhem.
She told us the One Big Beautiful Bill “does not add to the deficit.” The Congressional Budget Office said it added trillions. Every independent analysis agreed. FactCheck.org did the arithmetic. It was a number. She was handed the number, she stood at the most authoritative lectern in the country, and she lied with the serene confidence of a serial killer.
She announced that “tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.” A tariff is a tax by definition. It is a tax on imports, paid by importers, with the bill handed to you at the register. Calling it a tax cut is not spin, not framing, not the honest exaggeration of an advocate. It’s a lie. PolitiFact rated it false, which was courtly of them.
She pushed a story that the administration had stopped fifty million dollars in condoms bound for Gaza. A lie. Snopes took it apart. There was the lie about thirty-two thousand USAID dollars for a transgender comic book in Peru. Snopes took that apart too. She blamed an egg shortage on the previous administration “directing the mass killing” of a hundred million chickens, a construction PolitiFact rated Half True. After a man tried to force his way into the Correspondents’ dinner, she stood up and read a list of Democratic quotes she said were inciting violence. FactCheck.org found she had used several of them out of context. She read them anyway.
The list is endless.
And here is the part that should embarrass her defenders more than it does. A great deal of what circulates about her is fake. She never said the Iran war would end if Trump “had better intelligence.” She never told anyone to avoid “woke things like math.” Parody accounts built those and readers swallowed them whole. A serious critic throws every last forgery in the bin, and the remarkable thing, the genuinely damning thing, is that it does not matter. The authentic record stands without the counterfeits.
Now the load-bearing hypocrisy.
Leavitt is “Catholic.” Not privately, of course. In Trump’s orbit the new Christianity is the oldest one. Rubio, Vance, all of them “devout.” In the case of Trump women, the tell is the diamond cross. Central Catholic High School. Scripture posted to three million followers. Motherhood billed as the closest thing to Heaven on Earth. Faith invoked as the bedrock of her life, the thing that supposedly makes her different from the rest. She turned her Catholicism into a credential.
The Eighth Commandment is not fine print. “You shall not bear false witness.” Her brand of Catholic seems to have a loophole where the commandment lapses the moment the camera clicks on. The church is not vague about this. Truth is not a vibe. It is a debt you owe to God and to the person in front of you, and it does not get smaller because Trump says something’s true or the falsehood polls well.
The defense is threadbare and she is welcome to it. A press secretary advocates. Spin is the job. She believed what she said. Fine. Then she believed the deficit numbers against the CBO and every economist alive, which is not faith, it is stupidity.
There exists a demanding version of Catholic life. You tell the truth when the truth costs. You lose honestly rather than win dirty. It has real practitioners and a few genuine martyrs. Leavitt knows she lies and that is all you need to know about her claim to faith. It is a prop, pure and simple. The irony that the most corrupt, self-dealing presidential inner circle all claim this tremendous faith would be hysterical if it didn’t actually work on people.
The tributes will keep pouring in. She was disciplined. She was quick. She was, in the airless professional sense, good. The trouble is the noun. What she was good at was lying to the American people, delivering them in the cadence of the devout, and never once flinching, because flinching requires a conscience she does not have. She is leaving to spend more time with her two children. Please. How much you want to bet we’ll be seeing her on Fox or Newsmax?
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