The Media Research Center continues to be excited at the sycophantic performance of White House press secretray Karoline Leavitt. Mark Finkelstein spent a Nov. 21 post being annoyed that Joe Scarboroguh said Leavitt and House speaker Mike Johnson were “lying through their f—ing teeth” regarading their comments on members of Congress reiterating the fact that members of the military can refuse to obey illegal orders:
Looks like Morning Joe forgot to lug along the seven-second-delay machine when it moved from MSNBC to MS NOW.
Back in 2008, we noted that Morning Joe had instituted the seven-second delay two days after Joe Scarborough dropped an F-bomb.
Scarborough went potty mouth again today. It came in response to Speaker Mike Johnson’s and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comments on the video released by six congressional Democrats telling members of the US military they can refuse to obey illegal orders.
Leavitt said: “So these members knew what they were doing. They were leaning into their credentials as former members of our military, as veterans, as former members of the national security apparatus, to signal to people serving under this Commander-in-Chief, Donald Trump, that you can defy him and you can betray your oath of office.”
Finkelstein didn’t defend the accuracy of Leavitt’s remarks — he merely complained that Scarborough used a swear word. And in fact, a Democratic congressman similarly accused Leavitt of lying about the video, which Finkelstein curiously didn’t mention.
Curtis Houck cheered that a right-wing radio host served up a softball question for Leavitt in a Dec. 1 post:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt closed out Monday’s press briefing by weighing in on-camera on her team’s decision to implement a media bias page on the White House website as well as lambaste The New York Times for their cartoonish, 2,100-plus-word November 25 piece suggesting President Trump is in both cognitive and physical decline.
Conservative talk radio host John Fredericks queued this all up, asking Leavitt to explain “your objective with” the page on the White House website dedicated to “Media Offender of the Week” that, as of this blog’s publication, has 31 such entries featuring everyone from broadcast news (ABC, CBS, NBC) to newspapers like The New York Times to online-only sites (Axios) to even local news (KTLA).
Leavitt said she was “glad you noticed, much to the dismay of some of your colleagues in the room” and the aim will be to fulfill their “promise on day one to hold the media accountable, because unfortunately, and we deal with this all day, every day around here, there are so many fake stories that are unfortunately written” based on anonymous sources.
[…]This went straight into her torching of The Times for a “deeply unfortunate” article by Katie Rogers, who happened to write two such articles during the Biden presidency laughably declaring him fit for office:
At one point, an exasperated Leavitt declared “are you kidding me” in reference to claims Trump was slipping (and thus linking him to Biden’s decline):
Houck also gushed over a right-wing reporter who also served up a softball question:
Rewinding to the start of the briefing, the great Isabelle Brown of The Daily Wire was in the new media seat and asked about cracking down on legal immigration in light of Wednesday’s deadly ambush of two National Guard troops in Washington D.C.
Houck followed with an even more sycophantic Dec. 11 post:
During a White House press briefing on Thursday dominated by questions about either the economy or Venezuela, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt threw down with former conservative reporter-turned-liberal CNN host and chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins over the former topic with Collins insisting the state of the economy was not as strong as Leavitt made it seem and Leavitt hitting back the economy has improved from the Biden years.
Collins started off by asking about President Trump’s comments from Tuesday night in which he was “telling parents two weeks before Christmas that they should only buy two or three dolls for their children.”
Leavitt first addressed the need to make more products in America: “[I]f we want products made right here in America…which is a large part of the reason the President has effectively implemented tariffs, then we’re going to have better quality products…Maybe you’ll pay a dollar or two more, but you will get better quality, and you’ll be supporting your fellow Americans by buying American.”
Leavitt broadened out and directly took aim at Collins and her network:
Why does Houck think Leavitt’s partisan attack on “Collins and her network” was helpful or professional beyond echoing his anti-media talking points? Instead, he declared that “Real Clear Politics’s Philip Wegmann served as Thursday’s example of how it’s farce to argue conservative media writ large shows up to White House events with softballs” by asking about President Trump allowing China to utilize cergain Nvidia computer chips. He then praised “our friend Elizabeth Mitchell at the Daily Signal” for asking another softball question, and he also gushed over “the great Kellie Meyer of NewsNation.”
Unsurprisingly, Houck didn’t call out Leavitt for the following instances in which was not on offense (h/t Mediaite):
- Karoline Leavitt Roasted Over Blatantly False Claim on Trump’s Tariffs Impacting Farmers
- ‘What Is the Plan?’ ABC’s Mary Bruce Grills Karoline Leavitt Over Coming Heath Care Price Spike
- ‘What Went Wrong?’ Fox’s John Roberts Bluntly Challenges Karoline Leavitt Over Disastrous Susie Wiles Story
There was also another fit of Trump obsessing over Leavitt’s lips, which was egregious enough that “Saturday Night Live” did a skit featuring it. And then there was the arrest by ICE of the mother of Leavitt’s nephew, which prompted the mom to say she made a mistake in trusting Leavitt. Houck was silent about these incidents too, which we’re pretty sure he wouldn’t be if Leavitt was not a sycophantic Republican in the Trump White House.