Karoline Leavitt needs a mentor. You won’t like my suggestion | Opinion
Not so long ago, I wrote nearly an entire column defending White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt from online trolls full of nasty complaints about her looks (”Too Stepford Wifey!”) or the age of her husband (”He’s 60, she’s only 28!”).
I found the remarks totally irrelevant and more than a little sexist. Plus, I felt a bit protective toward Leavitt — so young! so vulnerable! — in a motherly sort of way.
So I wrote a shame-on-you piece.
“It’s her job performance that matters,” I sniffed from atop my high horse, “not the way she looks when she’s doing it or the age of her spouse.”
But then she said something especially hideous (I can’t remember what) and I set that column aside in disgust, though I continued to feel a twinge of sympathy whenever people started poking their noses into her personal business.
‘Piggygate’ is an insult to all of us
That shallow reservoir of goodwill dried up in a nanosecond, though, after her boss — our president — pointed a stubby finger at a reporter and said, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”
Any woman who has ever, at any point in her life, been publically body-shamed (and that’s probably 97.9% of us) should have been appalled.
In insulting one of us, Donald Trump insulted all of us.
But what did Leavitt do?
She betrayed the sisterhood and ran straight to Trump’s rescue.
Amazingly, she didn’t attempt to excuse our misogynistic president by blaming his inexcusable conduct on “having a bad day” or “being off his meds” or “he was actually saying Peggy,” or some other such nonsense.
She painted this as a win for Donald Trump by noting that, unlike Joe Biden, he gives the press corps unprecedented access, so they should just suck up an occasional insult.
“Look, the president is very frank and honest with everyone in this room ... ” she told White House reporters. “And I think it’s one of the many reasons that the American people reelected this president, because of his frankness.”
So Trump isn’t mean, he’s just frank?
Wow. Leavitt is definitely not a girl’s girl, which is weird. As someone who has been the butt of so many sexist remarks — including Donald Trump’s creepy praise of her “machine gun” lips — you’d think she would have some empathy for a journalist who was, after all, just doing her job.
Instead of sticking up for her boss, Leavitt could have declined to comment on Trump’s boorishness — or taken the coward’s way out and called in sick for a few days, or weeks, or months to give it time to blow over.
Find a role model
Better yet, she could have up and resigned, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a woman I once found revolting but now consider kind of awesome.
(I will, however, knock her clean off her pedestal the moment she announces she’s running for president.)
Here’s why I’m impressed: Greene is not taking anymore you-know-what from Trump.
“Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the President of the United States, whom I fought for,” she said, alluding to her crusade to make the Epstein files public.
Let’s compare that to what Leavitt had to say on the Epstein subject: “This administration has done more than any, and it just shows how this is truly a manufactured hoax by the Democrat party, for now they’re talking about it all of a sudden because President Trump is in the Oval Office. But when Joe Biden was sitting in there, the Democrats never brought this up. This wasn’t an issue that they cared about because they actually don’t care about the victims in these cases.”
Would Leavitt allow her son to call someone ‘horse face’?
Leavitt is not a press secretary. Like all members of Trump’s inner circle, she is an enabler and a prevaricator, which is a genteel way of saying liar.
For instance, she cannot actually believe it’s OK to call a woman “piggy” — or “horse face” or “ugly” or a “dog” with “a face of a pig.”
Would she allow her son to use that kind of language on the playground? If so, what would she tell the offended parents? That they should appreciate her son’s frankness — who, by the way, wants to be president one day?
Surely, she recognizes that Trump’s behavior is not normal — is, in fact, unhinged — and that covering for him is immoral.
If not, someone needs to take her under their wing to tell her what’s what and teach her how to stand up to Trump.
In other words, she needs a mentor, and I have just the person mind for the job.
That would be my new hero, Marjorie Taylor Greene — provided, of course, that she doesn’t run for president.
This story was originally published November 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
