The 27-Year-Old Press Secretary Who ‘Speaks Trump Fluently’
It takes loyalty to rise in Donald Trump’s world. And on Saturday, July 13, Karoline Leavitt demonstrated it in uncommon fashion.
As she tells it, Trump’s then-campaign spokeswoman had only just carried her 3-day-old baby boy home from the hospital when she switched on the television to watch her boss’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa.
It turned out to be the fateful event at which a would-be assassin’s bullet clipped Trump’s ear. Almost immediately, according to Leavitt, she and her husband decided: She would scrap a planned maternity leave and go back to work, which she did four days later.
“The President literally put his life on the line to win this election,” she would later explain to the Conservateur, a conservative women’s blog. “The least I could do is get back to work quickly.”
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.
Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors