White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt holds an image of a rendering of the new White House ballroom to be built, during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 31, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Comedian Lisandra Vázquez has gone viral with her biting parody videos mocking White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's overwrought, highly performative defense of President Donald Trump. And her videos, posted on on YouTube, TikTok and X.com, are reportedly getting under Leavitt's skin.
But Leavitt isn't toning down her angry attacks on reporters or her strident praise of Trump.
In a conversation for The New Republic's podcast "The Daily Blast" posted on August 1, host Greg Sargent and New Republic Senior Editor Alex Shephard argue that Leavitt's adulation of Trump is growing even more extreme.
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Sargent told Shephard, "We can always tell when Trump is in a shaky situation when Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt rushes in to praise him with absurdly over-the-top obsequious flattery — and boy, did she not disappoint this time."
The journalists cited Leavitt's recent praise of Trump's foreign policy as an example of that flattery.
Leavitt, at White House Press conferences, is exalting Trump as a major peacemaker and claims that he "ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia." The White House press secretary commented, "It's well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize."
Sargent, however, told Shephard, "Many of these conflicts aren't at all over. But the really glaring thing is the single biggest promise of peace Trump made is an utter buffoonish failure. He said he'd end the Russia-Ukraine War in one day. In reality, he's been badly humiliated by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and clearly doesn't know what the hell to do."
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Shephard agreed with Sargent's analysis, saying, "I think in general, what you're seeing are, yes, a bunch of conflicts that have erupted over the last six months, but the Trump Administration's role in them has either been minimal or, in some cases, very self-serving. So, you've got this border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which just ended thanks in part to a call from the president who was threatening to withhold new trade deals if they didn't get their act together. But the irony of reclaiming this today is that Thailand and Cambodia just reaffirmed their peace deal in China yesterday."
Shephard continued, "It's not like the U.S. solely did any of this. With Rwanda and Congo, that deal has been criticized in part because it was driven largely by Trump's interest in Congolese minerals. So the peace deal that was reached there mostly just guarantees that the U.S. can continue to take whatever it wants from Congo. Saying that the Israeli-Iran conflict is resolved is remarkable to me because: (1) the president risked entering the country into a world war by sending U.S. bombers into Iran, and (2) this is Israel and Iran that we're talking about. This is hardly a settled issue, and it's one that I think threatens to blow up again in a few months."
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Listen to the New Republic's full podcast at this link or read the transcript here.