Donald Trump called out Karoline Leavitt while complaining about bad publicity to the press corps, suggesting the White House press secretary is “doing a terrible job.”
The president made the jab at Leavitt during a Tuesday press conference in the Oval Office, where he bemoaned the state of the media and the way he’s been portrayed.
“We have to straighten out our media,” Trump said. “The New York Times circulation, you know, has gone way down. The Washington Post is almost extinct.”
After slamming the legacy papers as “dishonest,” Trump declared that “people don’t believe the media,” citing the coverage of his 2024 presidential run, which suggested he was doing poorly before being re-elected, as evidence.
“I got 93% bad publicity,” he noted. “Some people say 97, but between 93 and 97 — maybe Karoline is doing a poor job, I don’t know.”
“She’s my representative,” he continued. “You’re doing a terrible job. Should we keep her? I think we’ll keep her.”
In response to the awkward comment, there was some light laughter in the room, indicating the president was likely just taking a playful dig at the press secretary.
“When you get 93 to 97 bad stories, bad press and you win in a landslide, do you know what that says? People don’t believe the press,” he added. “And when people don’t believe the press, that’s a very bad thing for our country.”
Trump then took aim at the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, which he said had “a lot of bad stories.” Watch Trump’s remarks below.
Trump’s criticism came a day after Leavitt sounded off on ABC, CBS and NBC’s coverage of the Sheridan Gorman case. Namely, the White House press secretary addressed the case during her briefing with the press corps Monday, where she said it was “despicable” that there wasn’t more stories surrounding the killing of 18-year-old Gorman, a college freshman who was allegedly murdered by an illegal immigrant in Chicago earlier this month.
However, this is far from the first time the White House has criticized the news media, as Trump’s administration infamously launched a “Media Offender of the Week” site last winter.
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