Goodbye Karoline Leavitt, we wish we’d known you less. After 585 days serving as President Donald Trump’s Press Secretary — the second longest tenure of the five he’s had while in office — Leavitt is stepping down from her role to spend more time with her two young children.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Leavitt described her departure as “bittersweet.”
“I’ll miss you guys. I know that’s probably not something anyone would expect me to say, but obviously it’s been great working with all of you,” she told a gaggle of White House correspondents. What “I think people don’t realize about this job — the briefings and what I just did on TV — is 10 percent. Ninety percent of it is taking all of your calls at five in the morning and 11 p.m. at night, and I won’t really miss that. But I will miss working with you guys every day.”
At 29, Leavitt is the youngest press secretary Trump has had over the course of the two terms — and the youngest in the position’s history. She has been in the post since Trump retook the White House, and quickly became one of the most recognizable faces of Trump 2.0’s push towards increasingly authoritarian and inhumane policies, and the primary laundress of the administration’s overreach and misinformation.
Her successor has not been named yet — although plenty of right-wing blowhards are vying for the position. In the meantime, here’s a look back at some of the lowest lows Leavitt delivered to the nation from behind the White House podium.
The Epstein scandal was a “manufactured hoax by the Democrat Party”
Leavitt infamously claimed that the Epstein files, and the scandal surrounding them, were a hoax manufactured by Democrats. At one point Leavitt went so far as to imply that individual documents released by Epstein’s estate were potentially fabrications, defending Trump’s claim that a birthday card depicting a nude female figure drawn by Trump for Epstein was potentially a forgery.
Claiming Renee Good was a “lunatic”
After the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, Minnesota by ICE Agents, the administration jumped into spin mode. From the White House podium, Leavitt berated a reporter and called her a “left wing hack” after she questioned the administration’s description of Good as a violent instigator who had justifiably been shot. Leavitt later called Good a “lunatic” in a press gaggle with White House reporters.
Accusing the press of only wanting to “make the president look bad”
In March, less than a month into the American war against Iran that was only supposed to last a couple weeks, Leavitt berated CNN host Kaitlan Collins for pressing her on complaints by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about negative coverage of the deaths of six service members.
“It’s the position of this administration that the press in this room and the press across the country should accurately report on the success of Operation Epic Fury,” Leavitt said. “The press does only want to make the president look bad. That’s a that’s a fact,” she added.
“The president is literally constantly shaking hands”
When mysterious black bruises began to appear on the back of President Trump’s hands (along with really shoddy efforts to cover them with makeup) speculation grew that the president’s health might be in visible decline.
The White House offered up another explanation: Trump was constantly participating in crushing hand shakes with important people. “The president is literally constantly shaking hands, the Oval Office is like Grand Central Terminal,” she claimed, adding that the bruises were likely made worse by Trump’s daily aspirin regiment.
Insisting that the “body of water off of the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America’”
Trump loves renaming things. Early on in his second term, the president made a show of attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
“It is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the ‘Gulf of America,’” she snapped at reporters.
News outlets refused to adopt the change, leading the administration to attempt to ban the Associated Press from the White House Press pool. They were later reinstated via a judicial order.
Claiming millions were being spent on “condoms in Gaza”
Leavitt falsely promoted claims by the administration that — under Elon Musk — DOGE had prevented $50 million from being spent distributing “condoms in Gaza.” It turns out no such funding allocation existed, although the administration did cut a total of about $100 million in humanitarian aid programs to the region.
Blaming DEI and “skin color” for a plane crash
Following a deadly crash between a military helicopter and a passenger jet over the Potomac river that killed 67 people, the administration attempted to claim that the crash had been caused by “DEI” ideology producing underqualified pilots.
When you are flying with your loved ones,” she asked sarcastically, “do you pray that your plane lands safely or do you pray that the pilot has a certain skin color?”
Elon Musk posts incessantly about protecting Western civilization.
How Saving Western Civilization Replaced Making America Great Again
“She’s a traitor to the West.”
Elon Musk posted this on X on July 25 in response to a clip of Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist, saying on CNBC that Musk propagates a “caricatured” image of Europe as a deteriorating, unlivable hell hole. Beddoes had recently interviewed Musk, challenging his views on Europe, and confronting him for supporting far-right politicians and parties from Germany to the UK. Beddoes never questioned the hallmarks of liberal democracy: free and fair elections, separation of powers, equal protection under the law, or human rights. But in Musk’s mind, her pushing back on his caricature of Europe as a continent colonized by immigrant invaders proved enough to make her a “traitor to the West.”
The idea of “saving the West” isn’t limited to the feverish online posting of the world’s richest man. If one surveys the conservative media landscape on any given day, the call to “rescue Western civilization” appears ubiquitous. For example, on August 5, 2026, the day after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, the civilizationist discourse popped up in every corner of the American right. Podcaster Benny Johnson called for more politicians willing to “fight for Western civilization.” Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, released a podcast interview titled “The Battle Western Civilization.” Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State, posted: “The Democratic Party is being taken over by anti-American candidates who hate the values that underpin Western civilization.”
Noah Rothman, senior writer at the National Review, posted in response to a video montage of Abdul El-Sayed: “This race isn’t just about tax rates, or health care, or immigration enforcement. It’s about more than politics now. This is a fight over America and whether the enemies of Western civilization are right.”
None of this even touches the civilizationist outrage many on the American right — including Musk — expressed over the casting of Black actors in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Civilizationalist discourse isn’t a new summer trend. It’s surged since Trump’s second inauguration. In a July 2025 interview, Lara Trump even asked her father-in-law about his supposed nickname, the “bodyguard of Western civilization.”
I’ve spent the last two and a half years investigating the growing alliance among Protestant Reconstructionist Christians like Doug Wilson and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth; radical traditional Catholics like Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation and Vice President JD Vance; and Silicon Valley technocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin. What’s become clear: “Saving Western civilization” is now the unifying rallying cry of the American right, surpassing Trump’s infamous “make America great again” slogan and even the Christian nationalist mantra of taking America back for God. There’s a reason for this change. As I argue in my new book American Caesar, the crusade to rescue Western civilization provides an umbrella discourse that unites tech reactionaries with traditional Catholics and extremist Protestants in a loose alliance against immigrants, non-Christians, the LGBTQ community, and anyone who criticizes the United States.
While extremist Christians and Silicon Valley technocrats often disagree on issues related to AI, surveillance, and family, they are aligned on the idea that saving Western civilization from external threats like Muslims and migrants and internal threats like antifa, trans people, and feminists is the paramount issue of our time. Even though Elon Musk is not religious, many Christian nationalists see him as an ally in saving Western civilization from the foreign and domestic vandals they believe threaten it. By couching their shared mission in civilizational, rather than religious terms, they can forge a loose coalition against the groups they perceive as common enemies and existential threats to “our way of life.”
As opposed to Christian nationalism or MAGA, civilizationalism also provides a horizontal plane that transcends the United States, including Europe in the effort to rescue civilization from both attacking barbarians and domestic enemies.
In many ways, the civilizationalist discourse emanating from every corner of the American right is an escalation of the Christian nationalist currents that have been center stage during the Trump era. As the scholars Yilmaz and Morieson argue, “Civilizationism is an idea which posits that the world and its peoples can be divided into several ‘civilizations’, most of them defined by religion.” Western civilizationalists render “Western” people as moral, rational, and outright superior to others based on their religious-cultural values. This escalates MAGA’s hallmark xenophobia and Christian nationalism because civilizationalist discourse posits that “non-Westerners” “belong to a foreign civilization with inferior values derived from an inferior religion.” In other words, they are inexorably less than “us” as a people, and therefore unassimilable. There’s no room here for legal migration, pluralism, or multiculturalism. Rather, we are left with a vision akin to Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations model, wherein different people groups across the world hold competing values that can never be cohered. Moreover, American citizens who promote “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” or “anti-capitalist” views are suspected of being linked to either Islamist, or communist foreign networks. They are a foreign enemy cosplaying as real Americans. The goal of civilizationism is isolationist purity. The strategy to achieve it? Civilizational warfare.
Thus, we arrive at a startling truth: When Christian nationalists and technocrats rally to “save Western civilization,” their efforts are not meant to shore up democratic institutions, reinvigorate civic norms surrounding free and fair elections, protect free speech, or defend free thought. When a Texas A&M professor was told he couldn’t teach Plato — the pre-eminent philosopher of ancient Greece and perhaps all of Western civilization (outside of Jesus) — without permission, there was no uproar. When books are banned, the civilizationalists don’t blink.
Their retrieval of Western virtue is not focused on the merits of Athenian democracy or the Roman Republic, much less the Enlightenment values of free choice, personal autonomy, or freedom from religious imposition and/or censorship. In this case, saving Western civilization doesn’t mean empowering We the People, it means rescuing the country from the “immoral elites” who have sold out our country to inferior foreigners; the domestic infidels who refuse to abide by the binary gender and sex norms that both technocrats like Musk and Christian nationalists like Vance and Hegseth prescribe.
If a pure society, rather than a free one, is what they are trying to save, we are left with an important question: Who is going to do the rescuing?
There has been plenty of extremism among Christian nationalists for decades. However, what we are witnessing now is frightening escalation to something more radical: the desire to replace We the People with an all-powerful leader to purify the United States — a Red Caesar, a Protestant Franco, an Appalachian Pinochet, an Unbound Executive, or a Tech Monarch. In other words, a second American Revolution, but this time to seat someone like a king, rather than to break away from one.
There is an abundance of evidence that Trump and his allies are trying to manifest something resonant with these models. Elon Musk’s implementation of DOGE early in Trump’s second term echoed the tech-dissident Curtis Yarvin’s notoriously monarchist ideals. When he took the helm of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency early in 2025, Musk began implementing a “hard reboot” of the government following Yarvin’s blueprint. Musk’s DOGE lieutenants openly claim Yarvin as their greatest philosophical inspiration for gutting federal agencies, laying off workers, and destroying the social safety net. One DOGE team member told The Washington Post that Yarvin represents “the most crisp articulation” of what DOGE is trying to achieve. Another said that “it’s an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin,” and are using his authoritarian theory “to empower people on the ground to actually do stuff — even if they can’t admit it publicly.”
There is more evidence in the form of Trump’s defiance of the courts, particularly when it comes to his effort to rid the nation of the kind of external threats so often cited by Musk and his fellow guardians of civilization. An Associated Press review from May 2026 found that in 31 lawsuits his administration had “250 instances of noncompliance” in immigration cases, “from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.”
The list goes on: The Trump administration kidnapped and imprisoned Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and took control of the country’s oil. Now, Marco Rubio is ruling the country from afar with no plan for elections any time soon. To date, Trump has not received congressional approval for the war with Iran, which has been ongoing since February. Trump tried to rename the Kennedy Center. He demolished the East Wing of the White House. And his former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, was just appointed head of the Department of Justice. Oh, lest I forget: Trump ignored the Constitution completely when he tried to deport U.S.-born Americans.
The move toward an American Caesar, in many respects, is no longer a Christian nationalist movement, at least not in the way we often think of it.
The dream of the right is no longer to restore a time when white Christianity went hand in hand with America; a restoration of the supposed pax Americana of the 1950s. The outlook now is more grim and more extreme.
In the face of demographic change, cultural progress, and global crises, Christian Reconstructionists, reactionary Catholics, and Silicon Valley magnates long to “save” Western civilization by replacing American democracy with a post-constitutional Caesar who will rule without the burden of checks and balances or the sharing of power in any meaningful way. Trump is doing everything he can to oblige them.
Bradley Onishi is author of American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, on sale September 15 via Macmillan Publishers.