Donald Trump says Karoline Leavitt is doing a 'terrible job' and is responsible for ‘bad Publicity’
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "Donald Trump says Karoline Leavitt is doing a 'terrible job' and is responsible for ‘bad Publicity’")
Donald Trump and Karoline Leavitt aboard Air Force One on Jan. 27, 2025 Photograph: (AFP)
Donald Trump blames Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for “93–97% bad publicity,” triggering backlash over media attacks and controversial remarks.
US President Donald Trump awkwardly suggested that his Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, is responsible for all the bad publicity. Speaking at the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump launched an attack on the “fake press” for unfavourable coverage of him in a wild moment. He suggested that he receives “between 93 and 97” per cent bad publicity. He rather playfully blamed the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, “You’re doing a terrible job.”
“I get 93 per cent bad publicity, maybe between 93 to 97 per cent" Trump floated a phoney number in a sweeping statement and continued, Maybe Karoline’s doing a poor job…Should we keep her? I think we’ll keep her,” said Trump.
Trump said that he gets all this bad publicity but still won “in a landslide”, whereas his 1.5 percentage point popular vote margin was smaller than many previous election victories by other Presidents. Using this creates a distrust for the media among the “public”. “We have to straighten our media…The papers that are being dishonest. People don’t believe the media,” said Trump.
Trump's obsession with Karoline Leavitt
Karoline Leavitt, the youngest Press Secretary, is like a little play toy for the US President Donald Trump. This can be deduced based on his unstatesmanlike public remarks, which are not just in poor taste but sometimes lewd and obscene.
In an August 2025 interview with NewsMax, Trump creeped over Karoline Leavitt's lips, saying they “move like she’s a machine gun”. In a subsequent interview on Air Force One in October, in a Pennsylvania rally in December, he made similar remarks, and once himself admitted that calling her beautiful might be "politically incorrect" and could "harm his political career," but he does not care. In January 2026, during a turbulence in an Air Force One interview, he suggested that maybe he should “grab” Karoline Leavitt, to which many connected it to Trump's 2005 remark “grab them”.
These remarks are glaring examples of workplace abuse by a man taking advantage of the imbalance in power. Many suggest that Leavitt fawns over Trump to maintain her high-profile job. Leavitt had been the biggest defender of US President Donald Trump. She explained that these remarks show Trump's authenticity and recently called for him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
