President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist said he doesn’t see Karoline Leavitt holding on to her current post at the White House beyond another “year or two.”
That’s because Steve Bannon thinks Trump’s press secretary is likely destined for a much heavier-hitting role in the new administration, he told Politico for a new profile of Leavitt.
“After she’s spokesman for a year or two, I think she’s going to get a Cabinet position. Maybe chief of staff,” Bannon told the publication.
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The role of chief White House spokesperson notoriously proved something of a poison chalice during Trump’s first presidency, with the MAGA chief cycling through four press secretaries.
Sean Spicer, the first to hold the job under Trump, stepped down in July 2017, after reportedly “vehemently disagreeing” with the president’s decision to appoint Anthony Scaramucci as White House director of communications. Spicer went on to star in Dancing With the Stars.
Scaramucci in turn only served 10 days in that role before being fired over comments published in an article by The New Yorker, from an interview he claimed he thought was off the record, in which he attacked other members of the administration. He has since become a vocal Trump critic.
Spicer’s successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, fared longer but little better, repeatedly attracting widespread criticism for false and misleading statements about the White House agenda. Her exit was eventually announced by Trump in a June 2019 Twitter post, but not before she’d set at least three records for the longest period between formal press briefings. She went on to become Arkansas governor.
Stephanie Grisham then comprehensively shattered all previous records held by Trump press secretaries. After Sanders’ departure Grisham became the first press secretary in U.S. history to hold precisely zero press briefings, instead pushing the president’s messaging through sit-down interviews with news outlets viewed as friendly to his administration. She’s since said she didn’t want to hold press conferences during her tenure simply “because, unlike my boss, I never wanted to stand at that podium and lie.”
Grisham would move on in April 2020 to become first lady Melania Trump’s chief of staff, replaced as press secretary by longstanding GOP strategist Kayleigh McEnany—perhaps the most controversial of Trump’s spokespeople given her decision to falsely declare an early victory for Trump in the 2020 presidential election. McEnany has since become Fox News host and been criticized by the president.
For her part, 27-year-old Leavitt reportedly feels she is underqualified for White House chief of staff, the role Bannon apparently envisions her taking on. She is apparently nevertheless open to moving up the ranks in the Trump administration, and she continues to enjoy staunch backing from the president himself.
Politico reports that Trump has repeatedly told others in his inner circle he thinks it was a good thing Leavitt failed to win her 2022 congressional race in New Hampshire, as he feels it opened the way for her to assume her current role as his chief spokesperson.
“They cheated you out of it,” he reportedly told her, adding that “I’m so glad they cheated you out of the election, because now you’re with me.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Leavitt has indeed proven herself one of MAGA world’s fastest-rising stars. Having previously served as an assistant press secretary during the first Trump administration, she has marched in deft lock-step with the president’s brazen (and often contradictory) public announcements and statements in the months since he took office for the second time.
Alongside her open hostility toward representatives of media outlets considered adversarial by the president and his team, she has also increasingly made a concerted effort to widen White House access to right-wing new media voices.
Perhaps most controversially, that has lately included adding to the White House press pool podcaster Tim Pool, an ultraconservative social media star who was last year revealed to have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to spread pro-Russian propaganda during the 2024 presidential election.
