The Brady Briefings: Karoline Leavitt and the battle for the soul of America

Washington D.C.: A recent article in the Daily Mail aimed to explain why White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had a “frumpy fashion” sense.

The fact that we need an article to deconstruct the conservative sartorial choices of a 27-year-old in charge of getting the most powerful man in the world’s message out is in itself frumpy on so many levels.

Karoline has been a revelation since she first stood at the Press Room podium some two months ago. To the liberal media she’s a smug know-it-all with no respect for White House press tradition. To conservative commentators she’s the perfect combative foil to a legacy media juggernaut that has oft attempted to steamroll the their agenda. Both are right to an extent.

Karoline has one of the most unenviable tasks on the planet, she’s damned if she praises her boss, and damned if she doesn’t. Reviled if she fails to divulge enough ‘pertinent’ information and pilloried if she doesn’t do it with enough gravitas or deference.

But Karoline has embraced this task with a gusto that has permeated through a room broiling with animosity and suspicion. If Machiavelli was an architect, this would be his construction.

On one thing Karoline is crystal clear, she will stand by President Donald Trump to the bitter end, but unlike her much-mocked (some of it unfairly) predecessor Karine Jean-Pierre, Leavit has bought into her president’s doctrine with a zeal bordering on fanaticism.

And while fanaticism may fell weaker humans, Karoline plunders its vast emotional resources and fashions weapons with which to battle her ‘enemies’ in the Press.

Her run-ins with Kaitlan Collins have left the CNN star battered and resorting to supremely passive-aggressive resting bitch faces. The fanatic trumps the hypocrite every single time.

At the tip of Kaitlin’s spear is her smile: It disarms you into believing the 27-year-old will fold like a cheap napkin under the questioning of a pugnacious reporter. It’s only once the question has left your lips does the smile turn into a snarl. Too late buddy, the Leavitt Lash is on its way.

Kaitlin’s sunny demeanor hides a spine of admantium. The blue eyes flash like tractor beams as she surveys the press pack before her. It’s a hunt, and all her prey seem eager to be devoured.

Never before has a regular press briefing been such TV gold. All the networks tune in live, even the ones that froth with rage at everything this administration does.

Karoline is one false step away from becoming the poster girl for the ‘I-told-you-so’ brigade. One wrong word away from her age being thrown back in her face. And she knows it, so she battles. A warrior on a bloody field strewn with the corpses of slain secretaries, pummelled presidents and disgraced scribes.

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Kaitlin will also say things that were previously taboo. For instance when she told a reporter that the French should be thankful to America because if it wasn’t for “us they’d be speaking German”.

True? Certainly (although the case could be made that they are as likely to be speaking Russian). Should it have been voiced? Maybe not, but to Karoline it’s about the impact of the thrust, not the source of its delivery. It is precisely because it’s anathema to polite press society that it becomes so effective in Karoline’s hands.

Will Karoline Leavitt last the whole of Trump’s second term? The odds say no, simply because it’s also unlikely that all of Trump’s cabinet will survive four years. The grinder grinds, and the stresses and fractures of the public glare will lay low the best. For now Karoline is fighting Trump’s fight. A young woman dueling with the knaves of the Fourth Estate. A damsel of distress.

But one thing’s for sure, when Karoline goes home to her young child, the mask slips and the steel melts. What she sees before her as she holds her baby is the future of America, and it is then she realizes that all things fade into nothingness when confronted by life.

This job is not what she needs. It’s what she wants. And this too shall pass.