In November 2024, then-President-elect Trump named Leavitt as his White House press secretary. She is the youngest person to hold the position in U.S. history.
Leavitt began attending Saint Anselm College in 2015,[7] where she received a scholarship to play softball[8] and majored in communications and minored in political science. She interned with NBC Sports Boston but later shifted toward political journalism. Leavitt became involved with the New Hampshire Institute of Politics her sophomore year; as the institute's ambassador, she interned for a United States senator and WMUR.[9] By the end of her sophomore year, she had given up softball.[5] Leavitt applied for an internship at Fox News,[10] but later interned as a writer for the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence writing letters and notes on behalf of the president.[5] Leavitt founded Saint Anselm's broadcasting club and wrote for its paper, the Saint Anselm Crier. She later described herself as the "token conservative" on campus, and her writings reflected a conservative viewpoint.[6] In a 2016 opinion piece for the Crier, she wrote that the media was "frankly crooked" and "unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false".[10] Leavitt graduated in 2019, becoming the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college.[11]
Leavitt during 2022 Student Action Summit at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida
On July 19, 2021, Leavitt announced her intention to run in the United States House of Representatives election for New Hampshire's first congressional district as a Republican in an interview with WMUR. She said she was encouraged to run after President Joe Biden reversed many of the policies enacted by his predecessor, Donald Trump,[17] and after Twitter erroneously suspended her account while she was working for Stefanik.[18] Within three days, her campaign had raised $100,000.[4] Leavitt's campaign largely leveraged her experience within the Trump administration, as she sought to be viewed as the most pro-Trump candidate in the Republican primary.[19] She officially filed to run in June 2022.[20] Polling in August placed Leavitt second behind Matt Mowers, the Republican nominee in the 2020 House of Representatives election.[21]
Leading up to the primary, Leavitt criticized Mowers as insufficiently pro-Trump,[22] including noting that he was a former advisor to former New Jersey governor Chris Christie.[23] The dichotomy in Leavitt and Mowers's strategies exposed a divide in the Republican Party; Leavitt received endorsements from Texas senator Ted Cruz and representatives Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, and Stefanik, in a demonstration of support from right-wing lawmakers.[24] She concluded her campaign with a gun shoot at a fish and game club.[25] Leavitt won the Republican primary in September.[26] She was defeated by Democratic incumbent Chris Pappas.[27]
In 2022, Leavitt faced a Federal Election Commission complaint from End Citizens United alleging that her campaign and treasurer illegally accepted campaign donations over the legal limit and never repaid her donors. In January 2025, Leavitt disclosed in 17 amended campaign filings $326,370 in unpaid campaign debts she had failed to disclose for several years. Roughly $200,000 of the debt was composed of illicit campaign donations made in excess of campaign finance limits she never paid back, in violation of campaign finance laws.[28]
Post-election work (2023–2025)
After losing to Pappas, Leavitt began working for MAGA Inc., Trump's super PAC.[10] She was featured in a video produced for Project 2025 training political appointees on how to counter the federal bureaucracy.[29] Leavitt began working for Trump's 2024 presidential campaign in January 2024 as his national press secretary.[30]
White House Press Secretary (2025–present)
Leavitt at her first White House press conference, January 2025
On November 15, 2024, president-elect Donald Trump named Leavitt as his White House press secretary.[31] She is the youngest White House press secretary in history.[32] She was given a smaller office in the West Wing in comparison to her predecessors, with the office reserved for press secretaries instead being occupied by Taylor Budowich, the deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel.[10] Leavitt gave her first press conference on January 28, 2025, beginning the briefing by seeking to elevate non-traditional media.[33] During the press conference, she falsely said that $50 million in taxpayer dollars had been intended for use in funding condoms in the Gaza Strip.[34] Reporters indicated that the erroneous claim appears to originate from DOGE misinterpreting a grant to prevent the spread of HIV in Gaza Province, Mozambique.[35][36]
Her tenure marked a separation from precedent, particularly with the treatment of traditional media. In February, Leavitt announced that the White House would select who participated in the presidential press pool.[37] That month, she said that "new voices are going to be welcomed" alongside traditional media.[38] The next month, Axios reported that the White House sought to change the seating chart for reporters, potentially by appointing Leavitt as president of the White House Correspondents' Association.[39] Leavitt was named as a defendant in Associated Press v. Budowich (2025), a lawsuit that began after Trump's staff moved to block the Associated Press from certain press events over the Gulf of Mexico–America naming dispute. According to the lawsuit, Leavitt told Zeke Miller (the chief White House correspondent for the Associated Press) that the organization would be barred from certain areas of the White House unless it referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".[40]
Leavitt is a practicing Roman Catholic.[43] She emphasizes the importance of faith in her life, specially in facing the demands of her work.[44] She begins each day with a prayer to ask for strength,[45] and conducts a team prayer before each press briefing to ask for confidence and the ability to articulate her words.[44]
Leavitt holds her son while typing, White House, May 2025.
In December 2023, Leavitt became engaged to Nicholas Riccio, a real estate developer from New Hampshire who is 32 years her senior. They were introduced in 2022 at a restaurant during Leavitt's congressional campaign.[46] Leavitt has described Riccio as "an introvert" and her "opposite".[47] Their son was born in July 2024.[48] She returned to work within a week of his birth, on the day of Thomas Crooks's attempted assassination of Trump.[10] Leavitt married Riccio in January 2025, days before Trump's second inauguration.[46] A May 2025 photograph of Leavitt feeding her son while working drew international attention.[49][50][51] In December 2025, Leavitt announced that she was pregnant with a second child.[52]
↑"Karoline Claire Leavitt in the Washington, District of Columbia, U.S., Voter Registration Records, 1929-2023" (Document). Voter Registration Records.
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