Karoline Leavitt (it’s spelled like “leave it” but without the second e and with two t’s) is leaving us to spend more time with family.
Ms. Leavitt brought an interesting combination of traits to her job as White House Press Secretary. She was both earnest and enthusiastic; a practiced (indeed, compulsive) liar who wasn’t particularly skilled at lying; and a woman who projected both annoyance and defensiveness in defending Administration actions.
The annoyance and defensiveness seemed to have their origins not in any doubts she entertained about the merits of Administration actions. She seemed to harbor no such doubts. Instead, she may have projected annoyance and defensiveness as a deliberate, if transparent, strategy to put questioners on the defensive. Her annoyance and defensiveness also reflected–or were calculated to reflect–her utter incomprehension that anyone would question her boss’s norm-busting, grifting, and embrace of an ethics of destruction, chaos, and revenge. That incomprehension, if real, serves as powerful evidence that she isn’t particularly bright and certainly lacks anything like a moral center.
Often, she reminded me of nothing so much as a petulant teenager–a character with whom you sometimes have to deal, but whom you would rather just ignore. Again, the character traits she projected seems to have been part of her shtick. But since her tactics of deflection, aggression, and mendacity were so obvious to even casual observers, she was both bad at her job and very good. Bad, because no one with a brain believed a word she said, a gesture she made, a tone she projected. Good, because she was too irritating and exhausting to deal with.
In an Administration that hates truth and reality, the fact that she was a bad liar whom nobody could believe was just fine: who cares about the truth? In fact, her transparent (there’s that word again) and constant dishonesty itself devalued the very notion of truth. So I must give credit where it’s due: she was one of the Administration’s leaders in debasing the currency of truth.
In short, she was a horror who won’t be missed. We might wish to say that we’ll never see the likes of her again, but I am sure we will–as soon as Trump appoints the next press secretary.