Leavitt Leaves Her Toddler in the Lurch

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Karoline Leavitt’s peremptory departure from her position as White House press secretary has naturally raised a few eyebrows. The timing is, to say the least, odd. 

She states she wants to spend more time with her two little children, one just born in May, and that is just so wholesome that it feels rude and downright boorish not to honor such a motive unquestioningly.

Nevertheless. 

There are two things we know with great certainty that have applicability to this situation:

1. There is no reason to accept anything the Trump administration tells us as the truth, whether it comes out of the mouth of the president himself or out of that of his most devoted press secretary. The default setting is lie.
2. As a general rule, no ambitious government official quits to spend more time with their family. It’s the stock reason given when someone’s forced out or is about to be engulfed in scandal. It’s a standing joke, fodder for the late-night comedy circuit.

As the child of two working parents, I can’t say I really noticed, when I was two years old — or two months old — their precise comings and goings. Extended family, friends, and two beloved nannies stepped up and, somehow, I made it through. The traumas came later, when my parents were around too much!

Leavitt’s adorable toddler and infant would still be adorable come November, or even January. Which is the main reason that, as much as I’d like to take at face value Leavitt’s proffered reason for giving three weeks’ notice, I’m inclined to some serious doubt.

Leavitt’s devotion to Trump — her willingness to tell lie after lie for him during her tenure in this lie- and grift-infested second term — is already the stuff of legends. And we are less than three months away from a midterm election that will slam into focus a fork in the country’s road like no one’s ever seen before.

It’s a looming extinction event for the president and his wholly owned party. Or very possibly the death knell for our democracy, if things go that way.

In other words, this movie has cut to the chase — which makes it a very strange time for one of the lead actors to stop the car and get out.

Unless.

There are a few other possibilities worth considering.

1. Leavitt committed some cardinal sin — like being the White House leaker — and has been fired.
2. Leavitt didn’t at all like being left behind on the “death plane” in Turkey, while Dan Scavino, Waltine Nauta, and Natalie Effing Harp were cateringtrucked to safety with the Cowardly Lion himself.
3. Leavitt had a sudden-onset attack of bad conscience about her role in the destruction of her country for the benefit of Donald Trump. Maybe it had been building up, quietly, like an ethical aneurysm. 
4. Leavitt knows what’s coming and is getting out while the getting is good.

It’s worth noting that, while not particularly likely, 1, 2, and 3 are all roughly as plausible as the “spend time with family” thing.

That leaves 4 — which is where I’d put my money.

Few are better placed than Leavitt to have a true read on just how Trump is approaching the November reckoning. From the outside looking in, we see an obsessive malignant narcissist hell-bent on a slew of revenges and seemingly oblivious to electoral consequence, deluded as to his popularity, dismissive of all the polls as “fake,” and spending most of his remaining time and energy not on actually courting disenchanted voters, but on various schemes to rig the midterms.

These include: 

• Trump’s beloved SAVE Act, aimed especially at mail-in voters and the women voters in the disenfranchised absence of whom the GOP would cruise to congressional majorities in November.
• His demands for state voter rolls and detailed voter information, so his minions can order mass targeted purges of voter registrations.
• His threats of ICE at the polls, and military seizure of ballots and voting equipment.
• His gutting of CISA and the EAC, agencies responsible for maintaining election security and integrity.
• His musings about declaring a national emergency and invoking the Insurrection Act to either cancel or take federal control of the elections.
• His advance plans for challenges to every close Democratic victory, abetted by election-denier allies quietly seeded into election administration posts around the country and running straight through the ordinarily ceremonial seating of senators and representatives on January 4, 2027. 
• (NB: Trump’s mid-decade redistricting putsch has already netted the GOP a dozen or so House seats.)

And that’s just what’s in plain view. Leavitt may well be privy to more. 

Privy perhaps to more detailed and concrete planning to deny the results and stoke postelection chaos. 

Perhaps even to hints about actually manipulating vote counts (which, for what it’s worth, is somehow already on the radar of real, live cable news personalities like Ben Rhodes and Eddie Glaude).

Whatever it is, I’ll wager, has spooked Trump’s soon-to-be ex-press secretary out big time. Devoted, brilliant (it must be said), and essential as she is, Leavitt has no overweening yen to be on the train heading for this wreck. She’s proven a master of defending the indefensible, but even a master may know when she’s overmatched. 

She would have to “explain” how the guy on his way to being the most unpopular president in polling history managed to pull his party, unscathed, through the midterms, where the party of even popular presidents generally gets whacked — as millions turn out, way angrier than No Kings, to protest a rigged election.

Or tell America how great Trump has made it, and how popular he is, after the blue tsunami hits an election that is miraculously free-and-fair-adjacent. 

Or keep Americans up to date on the progress of the “national emergency” and the roll out of the Insurrection Act.

That White House press room podium won’t be the happy place for her it used to be.

For Leavitt, the doors are still wide open at Fox News, and anywhere else loyal Trumpers get to ply their trade and avoid their families. Presumably she wants to keep it that way. 

We wait on events to back up what I strongly suspect is her assessment that being the Mouth of Trump in the months to come is — even if there is no such thing for her as an ethical bridge too far — a questionable career move.

Some observers have savaged Leavitt; a few have, unexpectedly, come to her defense for handling a virtually impossible job with great, if misdirected, aplomb, and for being far less of a professional beast in private than when at the podium. 

I for one still can’t get past the little cross swinging just below the big lies.

I do wish Karoline the best in her parenting. She’s certainly had a crash course in meeting the needs of toddlers and infants.