White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 10, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
A recurring theme in liberal journalist Amanda Marcotte's articles for Salon is that President Donald Trump's loyalists must repeatedly "debase" themselves to demonstrate their loyalty to him. Former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and ex-Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Marcotte argues, went to endless extremes to please Trump only to get fired in the end. And she regards White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt as Trump's "chief gaslighter," emphasizing that she shows "unblinking shamelessness" in her over-the-top defense of the president.
Leavitt aggressively defended Trump after he threatened to obliterate the "whole civilization" of Iran in an April 7 post on his Truth Social platform. Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC and author/journalist, discussed Leavitt's defense of Trump's comments during an appearance on The New Republic's podcast, "The Daily Blast," posted two days after Trump's widely criticized threat.
When a reporter pointed out that Trump is threatening "to destroy civilizations," Leavitt insisted that he "absolutely has the moral high ground over the Iranian terrorist regime" — a comment host Greg Sargent described as "disgusting." Leavitt, Sargent argued on the podcast, was being totally disingenuous when she pretended that Trump was only threatening the Iranian government, not civilians.
Brooks told Sargent, "I mean, look, Leavitt is the kind of a young woman I hope my daughters will not become, which is to say that she is also perfectly comfortable lying through her teeth. And I think the single nicest thing one could possibly say about Donald Trump is that he lies through his teeth and he just says whatever random, insane, offensive thing comes into his tiny little brain at any given time. And the result of that is that it's not actually clear that Trump gave a millisecond thought to the distinction between the people versus the regime, or that he has any understanding or interest in the fact that it sort of matters."
The Georgetown law professor continued, "The nicest thing you could say about him is maybe he didn't actually mean it. Maybe what he meant was regime, but he certainly said entire civilization. That is what he said. And the ridiculousness of Leavitt acting as though this is so offensive and so mean-spirited to raise any questions about lovely President Trump's words is just bizarre in this context. We've got one person who threatened a civilization, and her feelings are hurt."
Sargent, a former Washington Post columnist, stressed that while the "Iranian regime is horrible," that "doesn't give us license to threaten and perpetrate mass atrocities ourselves."
Brooks agreed, telling Sargent, "The question wasn't who's more horrible, the Iranian regime or Donald Trump, which is, that's a really tough one, frankly. But that wasn't the question. The question was about U.S. leadership and U.S. moral standing in the world and in general. Iran does not have any ability to be a global leader or have any influence whatsoever or have any moral standing precisely because the Iranian regime has done terrible things, including to its own people over many decades. It's not clear to me why we would want to join them in that exclusive club of ass nations, frankly."
