President Donald Trump made a shocking “last legacy” pitch to Karoline Leavitt days before she left his administration, insiders have revealed.
In front of a gaggle of top aides in the Oval Office, Trump told his 29-year-old press secretary to permanently remove journalists from the White House’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, according to three people familiar with the discussions who spoke to The New York Times.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, authors of Regime Change, the bombshell book about Trump 2.0, said Trump told her it would be her “last legacy.”
Leavitt left the White House on August 27 to focus on her family after having a child in May, and has since landed a job at Fox News. She never acted on Trump’s latest anti-press brainwave.
Haberman and Swan’s insiders said that the president had pressed her to do so over a period of months, but the media remained in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room.
The room once had a swimming pool. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suffered from polio, added it in 1933.
Trump, who said in July that he hasn’t owned a “bathing suit in a long time,” is said to have wanted the dedicated press area changed back into a pool.
President Richard Nixon converted the White House indoor swimming pool into the Press Briefing Room, beginning in 1969.
Trump has floated the idea of evicting the press from the White House before, but, as his tight circle grows smaller and becomes stacked with more loyalists, the idea has gained traction again.
Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, did little to dispel the notion. “America is rightly distrustful of the fake news media because they fabricate stories based off lies and sources who are not even privy to any type of information,” he said in a statement.
“All options remain on the table, and we will make an announcement when appropriate.”
On X, he shared this statement along with three mischievous devil emojis.
Trump has accelerated his war on the press, largely due to the negative coverage he is getting during his second presidency.
After he banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House in September, he said on Truth Social that the prohibition was the result of “FAKE NEWS.”
During a press conference in New York City with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Trump was asked why he announced the ban.
He said, “I’m only doing it because I think the press also has an obligation. And, you know, I won in a landslide, I won the election in a landslide. I’ve done great things, I’ve done a lot of great things. I’ve settled eight wars. We have the best economic numbers for the country, in the history of our country. We have $21 trillion pouring in.”
He criticized media coverage of himself and of the war with Iran, which he described as overly negative given that “we’ve done so well.”
His claims that “I’ve settled eight wars” and “we have $21 trillion pouring in” are incorrect.
