Karoline Leavitt’s paradox: Admiring Trump’s Gen-Z press secretary’s sass while questioning her politics

Dubai: I reluctantly have a confession to make, and it’s not something I’m particularly proud of. And no, it’s not my other terrible habit; privately judging whether every newborn baby is actually as cute as everyone insists.

This is worse. Donald Trump’s youngest-ever White House press secretary, the soon-to-depart Karoline Leavitt, was my absolute guilty pleasure.

Yes, that Karoline Leavitt. Salon-perfect blonde curls, sharp dresses/bright power suits, a curvy silhouette and the immaculate, camera-ready polish of a Hollywood/Bollywood star; until she opened her mouth. Then the gloss gave way to gladiator mode, and the White House press pen became her arena.

For context, this wasn’t some high-minded political study on my part. On particularly tough days at work, when my brain was fried and I was craving Nandos, I would find myself tumbling down a Karoline Leavitt Reels rabbit hole.

Parody accounts, savage memes, clips of her sparring with reporters from the White House podium; I consumed them all. She could be combative, brusque and breathtakingly rude. Sometimes I cringed with second-hand embarrassment. Sometimes I laughed out loud. Sometimes I simply wondered: how on earth did she get away with saying that? But almost invariably, I watched until the very end.

Which is particularly inconvenient because I don’t agree with her politics. I don’t agree with much of what she so fiercely defended during the Trump administration.

So why couldn’t I stop watching her? Because beneath all the politics, outrage and meme-worthy theatre, I was fascinated by one thing: the woman had nerve.

Where does that kind of confidence come from, I kept wondering with each hilarious, spoofy reel.

Now, as Leavitt prepares to leave her role as White House press secretary at the end of August, I find myself thinking about what exactly made her such compelling viewing. At 28, she leaves as the youngest person ever to have held the job. She says she is stepping away to focus on her young family, although she is expected to remain an outside adviser to Donald Trump, according to Reuters.

Politics aside, she stood behind perhaps the world’s most scrutinised lectern and rarely looked intimidated. Spectacularly dismissive and often dripping with disdain, her clashes with reporters could be reality-TV gold. But hesitation? You rarely saw it and and that aspect fascinated me.

How do you acquire that kind of conviction? How do you face a room of seasoned political journalists and seemingly never suffer that very human afterthought: “Oh God, did I just sound like an idiot?”

Maybe that is precisely what made Leavitt so effective at the job Donald Trump wanted her to do. She wasn’t there to win over her critics. She wasn’t there to charm reporters who disagreed with the administration. She was there to defend a president and his agenda, aggressively and unapologetically.

That certainty also made her perfect for the social-media age. Her confrontations escaped the briefing room almost instantly. Clips were chopped up, captioned, celebrated, mocked and meme-ified. Depending on which corner of the internet you inhabited, Leavitt was either demolishing the media or demonstrating an extraordinary hostility towards journalists. And yes, I consumed those memes too.

But behind the entertainment value sits a much more uncomfortable question.

What happens when confidence becomes contempt?

Let's face it: there is a difference between handling a hostile question and treating the questioner as the enemy. There is a difference between being an extraordinarily effective political communicator and creating an environment in which scrutiny itself is portrayed as illegitimate. That distinction matters because the person behind the White House podium isn’t simply participating in another television debate. The government has power. The journalists questioning it are supposed to scrutinise that power.

During Leavitt’s tenure, that relationship reportedly changed significantly. The Trump White House allegedly took greater control over which journalists could participate in the presidential press pool, according to reports. The administration argued that it was opening access to newer and non-traditional media; critics saw the changes as an attempt to exert greater control over who could closely cover the president, according to Reuters.

So my fascination with Leavitt comes with a very large caveat. I can admire someone’s ability to stand her ground without admiring what she is standing for. In fact, perhaps that contradiction is what made her so interesting to watch.

As a woman who spends much of her professional life asking questions, interviewing powerful people and occasionally being told that a perfectly legitimate question is inconvenient, I know confidence matters. Watching Leavitt sometimes made me wonder whether women, in particular, could learn something from that absolute refusal to shrink in a difficult room.

I am not endorsing her apparent rudeness or those personal attacks nor am I on board with her tendency to humiliate journalists asking uncomfortable questions by getting personal.

But you have to admire her nerve and that insane ability to hold your ground when an entire room is challenging you. The ability to articulate your position without constantly apologising for occupying space. The willingness to withstand being disliked. I believe there is something formidable about that. There is also something dangerous about it when conviction becomes so absolute that opposing voices are treated not as part of democracy, but as obstacles to be defeated.

That is the paradox I will remember about Karoline Leavitt’s time at the podium.

She made political communication look like combat. She understood that in 2026 the exchange itself was content: every clash could become a reel, every comeback a headline, every confrontation another piece of political theatre. I won’t miss the politics. I certainly won’t miss seeing legitimate journalism treated as an adversary.

But those clips and Those memes? That moment when a reporter had barely finished asking a question and you could already see Leavitt preparing to fire back? I suspect my social-media feed is going to be considerably less entertaining.

And perhaps there is one thing worth stealing from the Karoline Leavitt playbook, regardless of where you stand politically: Walk into the room knowing you belong there.

But just remember that confidence is most impressive when it doesn’t require silencing somebody else.