Karoline Leavitt

If you want to work for Donald Trump, you have to be loyal, unflappable and television-ready, with a look straight out of "central casting". Being rich also counts.

- By Sarah Baxter

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, ticks every box. She is a natural on Fox News. She looks hot - a “10”, sniped a woman talk show host, doubting her qualifications for the job. But Leavitt is a revelation. At 27, with a baby under one and a husband pushing 60, she has remarkable aplomb.

Steve Bannon calls her “tough as old boots”. He predicts Leavitt will soon have his old White House job. “After she’s spokesman for a year or two, I think she’s going to get a cabinet position. Maybe chief of staff,” he told Politico.

Leavitt has whirred through a dizzying array of controversies without skipping a beat. Trump's pause on tariffs? That’s just “the Art of the Deal,” she spinned. Replacing Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon? “Fake news.” The boiling hostility between federal axeman Elon Musk and Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser? “Boys will be boys,” she cooed.

Leavitt doesn't rely on a thick sheaf of notes at White House briefings. “I want to just go in there and speak from my mind and from my heart,” she told the podcaster Megyn Kelly. Before every joust with journalists, she prays. “Lord Jesus, please give us the strength, the knowledge, the ability to articulate our words and have fun and be confident,” she said in a video posted on X.

Charming, but with a mean-girl glint, Leavitt regularly slaps down journalists who try to get the better of her. “It’s insulting you're trying to test my knowledge of economics,” she jabbed at an AP reporter. Like her boss, she has no qualms about dispatching illegal immigrants to El Salvador’s mass jail, in defiance of the US courts.