After four years of viciously attacking President Biden’s White House press secretaries Jen Psaki and (especially) Karine Jean-Pierre, the Media Research Center’s Curtis Houck got himself psych for the MRC’s transition from Resistance Media to Trump Regime Media by praising Donald Trump’s pick for his press secretary in a Nov. 15 post:
Buckle up, White House press corps. Things are about to become way different from how things have been with Karine Jean-Pierre!
On Friday night, President-Elect Donald Trump named longtime aide and Trump 2024 campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt as the incoming White House press secretary and set to do battle with the liberal journalists in the Brady Briefing Room come January 20, 2025.
Trump praised her in a statement as having done “a phenomenal job as the National Press Secretary on my Historic Campaign.”
Adding she’s “smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator,” Trump stated he has “the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, Make America Great Again.”
Leavitt not only spoke on behalf of President Trump on conservative networks, but she also sparred with liberal journalists and anchors on networks such as CNN and the news streaming platforms for ABC and NBC.
Most infamously, Leavitt had a June 24 appearance on CNN This Morning cut short for the crime of upsetting host Kasie Hunt by referring to then-upcoming presidential debate co-moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper as liberal journalists.
The Briefing Room will be familiar territory for the 27-year-old Leavitt as she not only interned in the first Trump administration, but also served as an assistant White House press secretary under Trump’s fourth press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
Houck concluded by gushing:
So, having witnessed McEnany masterfully go into battle with the liberal media, Leavitt will undoubtedly be ready for the nonsense, constructive, and even, yes, good-faith questions from the press.
Exit question: Who will be Leavitt’s chief antagonist like CNN’s Jim Acosta was for McEnany and predecessors Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sean Spicer?
We remember that Houck had quite the crush on McEnany, something we expect to reignite for Leavitt.
Houck spent his writeup of the Nov. 21 White House press briefing insisting that “Jean-Pierre embarrassed herself with meandering, stumbling answers about both her successor Karoline Leavitt in the second Trump administration and layoffs inside the Democratic Party”:
McClatchy’s Michael Wilner had a simple question about whether Jean-Pierre has spoken to Leavitt. Click the tweet to see the monstrosity of an answer that she managed to stretch a simple no into nearly 90 seconds of mumbling and stumbling:
[…]theGrio’s April Ryan — who would be near the top of any hypothetical list of potential leading Leavitt adversaries — followed up on Leavitt by whining about how “there was a period of time where we had no press briefings” during the first Trump presidency (especially under the tenure of Biden-Harris supporter Stephanie Grisham, but we digress) and whether Jean-Pierre would be upset if things changed:
Houck failed to mention the fact that McEnany effectively abandoned her job by refusing to hold press briefings in the final two weeks of the first Trump administration so she wouldn’t have to talk about the Capitol riot. No wonder Houck wanted to insist that talk of previous Trump press secretaries was a “digression.” (Houck and his boss, Tim Graham, failed to ask McEnany about this in a softball 2022 interview with her.) And Houck insisting that Grisham was a “Biden-Harris supporter” when she was Trump’s press secretary is bizarre if not counterfactual; she stopped supporting Trump after the Capitol riot, a relevant thing to mention, and realized that Trump is a toxic person.
Meanwhile, the MRC has refused to tell its readers about some issues Leavitt has:
- She was caught deleting social media posts praising then-Vice President Mike Pence and a Capitol Police officer after the Capitol riot.
- She was a part of the small army of right-wing writers who was paid to write propaganda (well, more accurately, put her name on talking points others wrote) on behalf of shady Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, who was later convicted on federal fraud charges. (The MRC promoted another Guo propagandist, Matt Palumbo.)
Don’t expect Houck to remind you of any of this — his job is to help Leavitt spin a pro-Trump narrative, not to tell the truth. That’s how Trump Regime Media works.