Taxpayers are no longer paying Karoline Leavitt to lie to them from the White House podium. She’s gone

On Karoline Leavitt’s final day as White House press secretary, President Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office, took a black marker to a map and crossed out the name of a 7,300-square-mile Great Lake shared with Canada.

“Lake Ontario, that’s gone,” Trump declared as he replaced it with “Lake America.”

Then came an emphatic clarification. “Without the ‘of,’” he said.

Trump also signed an executive order Thursday directing the federal government to adopt “Lake America,” a name Canada is under no obligation to recognize.

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It was not the first time Trump had attempted to revise geography with a marker. In 2019, after he incorrectly said Hurricane Dorian threatened Alabama and the National Weather Service contradicted him, Trump displayed an official hurricane forecast map that appeared to have been altered with a black marker to extend the storm’s projected path toward the state. “Sharpiegate,” as the episode became known, turned an easily correctable presidential mistake into a dayslong spectacle over whether the government would alter reality rather than acknowledge Trump was wrong.

Seven years later, the Sharpie was back.

There was also an irony in the body of water Trump chose to rename on Leavitt’s last day. Leavitt, who attacked transgender people on her first day on the job, spent her tenure overseeing a White House press operation that punished The Associated Press for refusing to adopt Trump’s preferred name for another one.

After Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” for federal purposes in 2025, the AP said it would acknowledge Trump’s action while continuing to use Gulf of Mexico, the internationally recognized name for a body of water shared by the United States, Mexico and Cuba. The White House responded by excluding AP journalists from some presidential events, including in the Oval Office and aboard Air Force One.

Leavitt then announced that the White House would take control of deciding which news organizations would participate in the presidential press pool, stripping that authority from the independent White House Correspondents’ Association.

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A federal judge later ruled that the administration violated the AP’s First Amendment rights by retaliating against the news organization over its editorial choice. And on Thursday, the press secretary who helped oversee that transformation of White House press relations was leaving.

Standing outside the West Wing, Leavitt offered reporters a surprisingly sentimental goodbye.

“It’s very bittersweet,” she said. “I’ll miss you guys. I know that’s probably not something anyone would expect me to say.”

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Leavitt said the televised briefings that made her one of Trump’s most visible defenders represented only about 10 percent of her job. The other 90 percent, she said, was “taking all of your calls at five in the morning and 11:00 PM at night.”

Leavitt isn’t exactly leaving Trumpworld. She has confirmed that she will return to MAGA Inc., Trump’s super PAC, in September, where she worked before joining Trump’s 2024 campaign. Her exact title has not been announced, but Trump said she will remain one of his “top outside advisors” as Republicans head into the midterm elections.