Karoline Leavitt will tell her last lie from the White House podium this month. Trump says she's leaving

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will leave her post at the end of August, closing a tenure in which the administration’s youngest-ever chief spokesperson became one of its most aggressive defenders — including when the facts did not support what she was saying and when transgender Americans were the target.

Trump announced Leavitt’s departure on Truth Social shortly after 3:30 p.m., saying the 28-year-old wanted to spend more time with her two young children. She recently returned from maternity leave after giving birth to her second child in May. Leavitt is married to Nicholas Riccio, a 60-year-old New Hampshire real estate developer—the couple, who have a 32-year age gap, married in January 2025. Trump said Leavitt would remain “one of my top outside advisors” as Republicans approach the midterm elections. He has not named her successor.

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“Karoline has been one of the best White House Press Secretaries in the History of the Office,” Trump wrote.

Independent fact-checkers documented a considerably less flattering record.

At Leavitt’s first briefing in January 2025, she promised to “provide the truth” from the podium. She then claimed the Biden administration had been preparing to spend $50 million on condoms in Gaza, for which the administration provided no evidence. PolitiFact rated the claim false.

In March, Leavitt declared that “tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.” PolitiFact rated that false, noting tariffs are taxes imposed on imported goods, and their costs can be passed along to U.S. consumers. Two months later, the organization again rated Leavitt false after she claimed Trump’s tax and spending legislation “does not add to the deficit.”

Leavitt also became a reliable public voice for an administration carrying out a sweeping assault on trans rights.

From her first briefing, she celebrated Trump’s order directing the federal government to recognize only male and female sexes and disparaged federal spending related to “transgenderism and wokeness.” She repeatedly defended Trump administration efforts restricting transgender participation in sports and access to gender-affirming care.

One particularly revealing episode came in August 2025, after Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the out gay director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, resigned amid turmoil at the agency. Daskalakis warned in his resignation letter that changes to vaccine policy threatened “the youngest Americans and pregnant people.” Leavitt seized not on his warnings about public health but on those final two words.

Related: White House press secretary ties voting bill to unrelated anti-trans Trump agenda in Fox News appearance

“One of those individuals wrote in his departure statement that he identifies pregnant women as pregnant people,” Leavitt told reporters. “So that’s not someone who we want in this administration anyway.”

Daskalakis later told The Advocate that his wording was intentional and connected Leavitt’s attack to the administration’s treatment of transgender people. “I accept the note, and I don’t care,” he said.

Leavitt’s tenure was also marked by an extraordinary White House effort to exert greater control over the journalists covering the presidency. In February 2025, after the Associated Press refused to adopt Trump’s preferred “Gulf of America” terminology for the Gulf of Mexico, the White House barred AP journalists from some presidential events. Leavitt then announced that her press office, rather than the independent White House Correspondents’ Association, would decide which news organizations participated in the presidential press pool — stripping the journalists’ organization of a role it had performed for generations.

Related: Karoline Leavitt: Trump wants 'less LGBTQ graduate majors' from Harvard

The WHCA warned that allowing the government to choose the reporters who cover it threatened the independence of the press.

The administration went further in April, eliminating the permanent pool positions traditionally held by the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg and reserving day-to-day discretion over who would get access. The WHCA called the policy another way to “retaliate against news organizations for coverage the White House doesn’t like.” Leavitt portrayed the broader shake-up differently, opening a “new media” seat in the briefing room to podcasters, influencers and other digital creators and arguing that the White House was adapting to the way Americans consume news.

“Thank you, Karoline, for a job well done!” Trump wrote.