Playacting for journalists standing in an unruly huddle just off camera, Trump asked questions of the oilmen, wondering how soon they could suck the ground under Venezuela dry. “And you’re very much set up for the heavy oil, right?” he asked at one point. There was an implicit cruelty behind the exercise. He wanted the cameras to see him place Venezuela on the table like a celebratory goose and start slicing.
The White House press-briefing room, a small theatre for an increasingly sick show, sits atop what used to be a swimming pool. The pool was installed during the Administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who swam to maintain his strength after his paralysis. Today, the room is the central site of the Trump Administration’s ritual humiliation of the American media. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, presides over the space, transmitting the spleen and the constantly shifting imperatives of the President.
She’s good at the job. Some press secretaries show hints of strain, managing the dual tasks of carrying the boss’s message and playing it straight with the press. Leavitt—who ran for Congress, in 2022, and lost—betrays no such struggle. She has a placid, open face and often, when she’s in a jovial mood, jokes around behind the lectern. When a wonky issue like health care comes up, she tends to read deftly and quickly from a sheet of talking points. When one of the President’s favored hot-button issues arises, she speaks fluently off the cuff, as she did recently when describing undocumented people being hunted by ICE as “criminal illegal-alien killers, rapists, and pedophiles.”
Even when Leavitt is acting enraged, she does so with a small smile. Case in point: a fracas with Niall Stanage, a columnist from The Hill, who wanted to know how the Administration could possibly believe that ICE’s activity was going “correctly,” as the President had enthused, when, for instance, one of its officers had been filmed shooting and killing Renee Nicole Good.
Leavitt took on the strict tone of a teacher: “Why was, uh, Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?”
“You’re asking me my opinion?” Stanage asked.
“Yeah!”
“Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably.”
Leavitt pounced. “Oh, O.K., so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion.” She said “left-wing opinion”—referring to an opinion she’d solicited just a second ago—with a slight, taunting singsong in her voice. She continued, “Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack, you’re not a reporter, you’re posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question. And you and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist—you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat.”
This short diatribe, delivered with a raised voice (but, still, that smile) was a characteristic sample of the Administration’s verbal style. Its members apply names and labels—illegal, criminal, alien, left-wing, agitator—in order to dehumanize the people to whom those words are supposed to refer. If you fit into this ever-growing lexicon of categories, you shouldn’t have your job, or sit in your seat, or try to protect your neighbors, or even, in Good’s “unfortunately and tragically” illustrative case, be left alive.
A few days earlier, Vance had given a press conference to shame the media about its reporting on Good and her killer, Jonathan Ross, and to slant the story in a more Trump-friendly direction. Vance showed off a way with words quite similar to Leavitt’s, and to Trump’s. He made sure to note that Minnesota was under siege by fraud, perpetrated mostly by “Somali immigrants.” Without the benefit of a thorough investigation, he nonetheless asserted that Good had been trying to ram Ross with her car, called her a “deranged leftist,” and, admitting that her death was a tragedy, deemed it “a tragedy of the far left.” So many names for nonpersons, emitted with such ease!
And yet Trump doesn’t always sound so pleased with the promotional efforts of his team. On January 20th, to mark a year since he retook office, the President made a guest appearance at Leavitt’s briefing. She’d teased the spot on her X account with QVC-ish good cheer: “A very special guest will be joining me at the podium today. . . . TUNE IN! 👀🇺🇸.”
Trump showed up with a thick sheaf of papers, listing the “accomplishments” of the year. He’d turned the United States into the “hottest country anywhere in the world” and wanted to get some credit. “We’ve had the best stock market in history,” he said. “I mean, I’m not getting—maybe I have bad public-relations people, but we’re not getting it across.” ♦
