White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holds a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 29, 2025. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
President Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff, Miles Taylor, is mocking the Republican’s current press secretary for a gaffe that arguably symbolizes the administration’s larger seeming ineptitude.
Reflecting on how Karoline Leavitt said that what Trump reveals tonight "will shock you if you have an honest eye listening to the president,” Miles Taylor quipped that “yes, and if your ears watch closely, you'll be doubly stunned.”
This is not Leavitt’s first faux pas. Earlier this month, while speaking with Fox News journalist Jesse Watters, the 27-year-old — who achieved her wealth by marrying a New Hampshire real estate developer who is 32 years older than her — expressed scorn for members of Generation Z that she claimed have turned to left-wing politics because they are supposedly entitled.
“My generation — I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me —have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them,” Leavitt told Watters. She described Generation Z as being fueled by “laziness and the liberal indoctrination” and suggested that they be sent to fight Trump’s war against Iran and threatened war against Cuba.
Similarly, Leavitt was heavily criticized last year for justifying the administration’s revisions of jobs data so as to imply that the American economy was performing better than was actually the case.
“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said during a press conference. “We want to ensure that all of the data ... coming out of the BLS is trustworthy and is accurate, which is why the president has restored new leadership at the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics].”
This reporter has also interacted with Leavitt while she made inaccurate or stylistically questionable statements. When asked about evidence that Trump’s ongoing Iran war is failing, Leavitt told AlterNet in May that he had in fact succeeded.
“President Trump’s courageous decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is grounded in a truth that presidents for nearly 50 years have been talking about, but no president had the courage to confront: Iran poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States of America and our troops in the Middle East,” Leavitt said in a statement. “The rogue Iranian Regime under the evil hand of the Ayatollah has killed and maimed thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years – and that ends with President Trump.”
Similarly, speaking to this journalist shortly after the second assassination attempt against Trump in 2024, Leavitt complained that a historian with whom he spoke compared Trump’s ongoing violent rhetoric and vilification of leaders who disagree with him to the actions of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“It's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler,” Leavitt told this reporter. “It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."