The White House will get its youngest spokesperson: 27-year-old Trumpist and former presidential speechwriter

The White House has never had a press secretary so young since Richard Nixon’s administration in 1969, who will hold the position in the next Donald Trump administration. This is Caroline Levitt, a 27-year-old graduate in communications and politics, who had a brilliant career in the Republican Party under the patronage of the tycoon. She had already predicted during the electoral campaign that she would occupy a prominent position if she won the election. Will take. The President-elect has thus continued his complex planning of appointments to his next Cabinet, asking his campaign manager, the provocative and sometimes rude Steven Cheung, to accept the position of communications director.

“Caroline is intelligent, tenacious and has proven to be a very effective communicator. “I have every confidence that she will help get our message across to the American people,” the president-elect said Friday night as he introduced his new spokesman, whose main job will be to respond to reporters in his typically daily appearance in the meeting room. , Press. She responded to her boss this Friday, showing her satisfaction in once again contributing to “Making America Great,” the motto of the MAGA movement to which she is deeply attached.

Levitt became a mother in June amid campaign planning. He comes from a New Hampshire family. His parents owned a truck dealership and an ice cream shop. She earned a softball scholarship and attended St. Anselmo College, the third oldest Catholic university in New England. Run by a Benedictine community, many of its monks have been military chaplains and its students include a good number of prosecutors, congressmen or former CIA director Mark. J. Sullivan.

The new press secretary of the United States began her Republican dominance early: in the university newspaper she published her first article in favor of Trump, then she worked for a while at the conservative Fox network during the 2016 election campaign. And then joined the team of employees. Trump administration office (2016–2020) that responds to presidential correspondence. He had not yet graduated in 2019 and was already writing speeches for the Republican president within his press team.

press room premiere

Following Joe Biden’s arrival at the White House, Levitt served as the mogul’s deputy press secretary. In 2022 she ran as a candidate for the New Hampshire House of Representatives, but was not successful. Between one activity and another, he directed the public communications of Elise Stefanik, a congresswoman who was appointed by Trump this week as ambassador to the United Nations.

He outsold by two years the well-known communications chief Ron Ziegler, whom Nixon had appointed to the same position in 1969. Ziegler inaugurated the White House Press Room, where Leavitt often spoke to reporters. There is a version, confirmed by some of the former President’s associates, that he inaugurated a broad policy in the political press leadership to combat critical information from the media, even if it is true, or attempt to manipulate it.

Like Trump, Nixon was also a leader who felt wronged by the media. In 1960 he married John F. Blamed him for his loss to Kennedy and then, once in office, exerted unbearable pressure on those who criticized him. Even through laws against freedom of the press or wiretapping. He banned professionals from ‘The Washington Post’ from entering the White House, while ordering his most loyal reporters to write “against his opponents”. He told Henry Kissinger and his colleagues, “The press is the enemy: Write it a hundred times and don’t forget it.”

Meanwhile, Ron Ziegler announced that anti-Nixon television networks would feel his wrath. He felt it too. He was in charge of dealing with the ‘Watergate affair’. Famous is the televised 1973 image in which he pushes Ziegler against a group of journalists, angry that his press chief had not kept him in line.

Trumo is no Nixon, but many communications experts find a connection between the two in his treatment of critical media. The attack and the use of a populist tone are quite coincidental, although the president, who resigned in 1974, and his loyal journalist companion have never publicly uttered such vile insults as those heard in this election campaign against Democrat Kamala Harris.

Caroline Leavitt will now have to undergo Senate confirmation, a process that has been assumed, and then her final work schedule remains to be defined. If Trump follows the usual line, it is normal for him to become the public face of the Cabinet. Indeed, in recent months, Steve Cheung has ensured that Americans have become familiar with him by thrusting him into the spotlight at events where he should have been the central negotiator as the magnate’s communications adviser.

The point is that no one knows whether the President-elect will stick to tradition or choose his own policy of messaging or torrent of speeches and posturing. At the moment, the US media is perplexed by the fact that Trump has appeared at public events only twice since winning the election and remains locked in the tea room of his Mar-a-Lago mansion, where he set up his pre-government office. Which appointments to public posts arise?

Although both will work in White House communications, Leavitt and Cheung’s positions are independent. The 42-year-old, born in Sacramento (Calif.) and the son of a Chinese family, has been with the Republican leader since his previous administration. And before that he worked as a spokesperson for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, an elite United States wrestling league that its legends are very fond of.

Cheung once advised important Republican figures such as Arnold Schwarzenegger during his tenure as California Governor and Senator John McCain. He is an extremely loyal Trump confidant, so it’s quite possible this term won’t have the spasms of the last term, when the conservative president fired six communications secretaries and broke the dismissal record by expelling one of them, Anthony Scaramucci. Was. , after only eleven days in office.