She’s been critical of the media since her college years
Leavitt was born and grew up in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, attending a Catholic high school in Massachusetts and working at her family’s ice cream shop during the summer holidays.
She studied at St Anselm College in New Hampshire on a softball scholarship. There, she was one of a small number of conservatives, The Washington Post previously reported. She wrote for the student paper, and also penned letters to the editor, accusing her professors of bringing liberal bias into the classroom and criticising the media for what she described as unfair treatment of then-candidate Trump during the 2016 election.
“Say what you want about Donald Trump,” she wrote at the time. “He is certainly not perfect, but he is without question running against not only a crooked candidate but the crooked and biased media as well. The liberal media is unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false.”
Though her childhood dream was to become a broadcast reporter, upon graduating in 2019, Leavitt got an internship at the White House under the Trump administration, working her way up to the job of assistant press secretary to fight against what she called “the biased mainstream media”.
She ran for Congress as ‘a Generation Z conservative’
After the 2020 election, Leavitt worked as communications director for Representative Elise Stefanik (Republican, New York). Leavitt helped Stefanik as she campaigned to replace Representative Liz Cheney (Republican, Wyoming) as GOP conference chairwoman, before launching her own campaign at the age of 23 to represent her hometown in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District.
“The reality is the liberal Democrat policies of this administration and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and my Democrat opponent are making life completely unaffordable for Generation Z Americans,” she said in an interview at the time. “My goal, as a Generation Z conservative, is to speak that truth and bring people to our side of the aisle.”
Her open support of Trump in a state that Trump lost twice led the top two House Republican leaders to endorse her opponent in the hopes that a more moderate Republican could win. But she defied expectations when she won the primary by 10 points, and the high-profile endorsements came flooding in, including one from Trump himself.
Though Leavitt ultimately lost the race to incumbent Representative Chris Pappas (Democrat), she posted on Instagram: “God closes one door so He can open another. I’m looking forward to opening it.”
She has embraced Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen
At the beginning of her campaign for Congress, Leavitt fully backed Trump’s false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. She also tweeted at one point that “Joe Biden absolutely did NOT legitimately win”.
Later, she said in an interview that Biden was the “legitimate” president – though when pressed if she would have voted to certify the election had she been in office on January 6, 2021, Leavitt said “probably not,” after reiterating her belief that “fraud and irregularities” occurred.
She embraced Trump’s Make America Great Again movement in the primary but removed such references on her social media pages as she entered the general election. After she lost the race, she went on to work as a spokesperson for MAGA Inc, a super PAC supporting Trump, before becoming part of his 2024 campaign.
She took on a combative role with the media during the 2024 campaign
As the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, Leavitt accompanied Trump to rallies, campaign events and his court appearances in Manhattan, and went on conservative and national media to echo many of Trump’s talking points, calling the criminal cases against Trump a “witch hunt that comes from the top, comes from Joe Biden” and decrying the Democrats in office.
She shared Trump’s combative approach to the press, saying during a warm-up speech at one of his rallies: “I have the great pleasure of fighting the fake news media all day, every day.” CNN ended a live interview with her in June when she accused Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, whom the network chose to moderate the first presidential debate of the 2024 election, of bias.
She has also been vocal about her role as a working mother – she told Fox News Radio that she was hired as the Trump campaign’s national press secretary shortly after learning she was pregnant with her first child, and she has shared photos of her son accompanying her on the campaign trail on her personal Instagram account, describing the period as her “working mom era”.
She told conservative women’s media the Conservateur that she gave birth to her son three days before a gunman opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in what the FBI determined to be an assassination attempt against him, and decided to return to work just days later, describing her experience as a working mother as “crazy but very rewarding” at the same time.
