White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has a view of the Washington press corps most Americans never will — and she clearly doesn’t like what she sees.
A year into President Donald Trump’s second administration, Leavitt has fired enough broadsides to establish a reputation for not suffering gladly the fools of the establishment media.
And the day after Trump delivered his primetime speech to the nation about military operations against Iraq, Leavitt was firing again.
The target this time was Politico, the inside-the-Beltway bible with a painfully obvious anti-Trump tilt.
Specifically, Leavitt was aiming at Politico’s preview of Trump’s speech, an article that relied on six unnamed sources and the tenuously informed opinion of one named source: Steve Bannon, a man with no official presence in Trump’s White House at all.
The article even used a quote from Bannon — “I came, I saw, I conquered” — as its main headline:
“‘I came, I saw, I conquered:’ Trump set to claim victory in Iran at primetime address”
The placement of the quoted words, followed by the word “Trump” are obviously deliberate to convey the impression that the quote is from Trump himself. It’s wildly misleading, it’s ethically garbage, and it’s not in the least surprising when it comes to how the establishment media covers the Trump White House.
The article confidently predicted Trump’s message would be one of victory (the strong implication that Trump would be simply looking for a way out of the military action) and an announcement that the U.S. is “winding down” it activities in Iran.
It wasn’t reporting. It wasn’t even preview reporting. It was liberal wish fulfillment — an obvious demonstration of the establishment media’s desire to see all U.S. military action as wrong-headed.
In a post on the social media platform X on Thursday, Leavitt blasted away:
This story was based on “six people familiar with the planning,” and I am sure none of them actually read the President’s speech before it was delivered.
Politico did not even reach out to the White House for comment.
Another example of why you should not blindly trust what… https://t.co/lSVIKrTUPW
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) April 2, 2026
“This story was based on ‘six people familiar with the planning,’ and I am sure none of them actually read the President’s speech before it was delivered,” Leavitt wrote.
“Politico did not even reach out to the White House for comment.”
And then she delivered the hammer blow:
“Another example of why you should not blindly trust what you read from the legacy media. This is what they do – call up random sources who just make things up, and then they report it as fact.”
No one who saw Trump’s speech saw him declaring victory. No one saw him looking for an off-ramp from the course he’s committed the country to (a course rendered unavoidable by the cancerous conduct of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a tumor on the global body politic since 1979).
At National Review, senior writer Noah Rothman — whose writings prove he’s no great fan of the president’s — summed up the differences between what Politico predicted and what Trump actually said in a Thursday piece:
“If [Politico’s] version of the president’s speech existed, it was not the one he delivered. Trump didn’t declare the war complete. He didn’t lash out at NATO. He didn’t even abdicate any American responsibility for contributing to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, the president established a sobering predicate for the war against the Islamic Republic, and he outlined the successes the campaign has enjoyed so far while relating in as much detail as information security allows about the mission still ahead of us.”
In other words, Trump did what an American president is supposed to do when he’s addressing the American people.
The problem here is not the president’s unwillingness or inability to level with the public. It’s the liberal-dominated establishment media’s refusal to level with the public on its own.
Politico is by no means the only problem, though its prominence in D.C. gives it probably more importance than it deserves. Remember, Politico was the outlet that originally published the “news” that 51 former U.S. intelligence officials had signed a letter that effectively discredited any reporting on Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop.
But it’s only one among many in a list of biased operations that appears endless: The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, pretty much any and every non-Fox news organization in the United States.
There’s a reason the hashtag #canthatethemediaenough has been a staple of conservative commenters for much of the social media era.
Readers and viewers don’t need to be conservative to spot the infuriating flaws in the country’s media establishment. They only need to be able to think critically, to challenge what they’re being told, and only accept what actually reflects reality.
Karoline Leavitt is clearly capable of all that, and, as White House press secretary, sees better than almost any other American just how pervasive the liberal bias of the establishment media actually is.
It’s no wonder she loathes it. The only question is whether she loathes it enough.
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