Why White House press secretaries still matter

Caroline Levitt, the White House Press Secretary, is leaving her job at the end of the month. She's been one of the faces of the Second Trump Administration and has really embodied her boss's disdain of the media. Today, we're going to look back at her tenure and take a bigger look at the role of White House Press Secretary in this ever-changing media environment. It's the MPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Tamer Keith. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. So, Tam, I want to start with a job of press secretary itself. What exactly is in the job description? There are a lot of things in the job description. There is the very public role that we see, speaking for the president. There's also a managerial role running the press office. And then there's the role of managing the relationship between the White House and the press corps. These are all very big, very important jobs that fall under the press secretary title. It seems fair to say that Levitt was pretty combative with the press corps. I mean, she showed it even in her first press briefing in the job. While I vow to provide the truth from this podium, we ask that all of you in this room hold yourself to that same standard. We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family. And we will not accept that. We will call you out when we feel that your reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House. So Levitt held the job for close to two years. She's leaving now to spend more time with her family. How would you both describe her tenure in this job? Well, I would say she was a very successful press secretary if success is defined on being the kind of press secretary that the president wants. She was a living embodiment of Donald Trump's approach to the press. And it goes much farther than disdain. He was outright hostile to the press. He didn't just use them as a foil. He tried to undercut any credibility. The mainstream media had with the public from calling them fake news to threatening to take away broadcast licenses for broadcast networks that the president doesn't like. But also he's used his department of justice to issue subpoenas to reporters who wrote stories he didn't like. She did, I think, exactly what Trump wanted her to do. She was polished. She never was off message. And she constantly berated the press and elevated pro Trump outlets over traditional media. Yeah. I mean, she really channeled President Trump in part because she has been with him for a very long time. She was a junior press aide in the first Trump administration. And she has become really a trusted advisor to him. The key to a successful press secretary and not all of them are successful. The key to being successful is knowing what the president is thinking because you are in the room. And she is certainly someone who is in the inner circle who was in the room who he trusted. And it's interesting because the way she handled her job in the in the public facing manner, the, you know, the the gloves off the fighting in the briefing room is blind by the way she ran the press office. This press office is actually surprisingly responsive. She managed the office in a way she wanted people to send out statements and respond to press inquiry. So in that way, she actually ran the office in a way that was helpful to the press. That said, and Mara alluded to this when it comes to that third part, the managing of the relationship between the White House and the press corps. And she was doing what the president wanted. But she oversaw just a dramatic deterioration of that relationship. News organizations punished for editorial decisions, kicking AP out of the pool, breaking the independence of the press pool, that group of reporters who travels with the president. Now the White House picks most of the people who are in that room, which is why when you hear the president getting asked softball questions, it's because they picked people to be in the room who would ask softball questions. Okay, Tam, just stop you for a second for a little bit of context. Can you explain what the press pool is and why it's important? So the press pool is the group of reporters that travel with the president wherever he goes, or say he's signing an executive order in the Oval Office. Well, all 500 of us who cover the White House can't go into the Oval Office. So a pool of reporters goes in and shares what they learn with the rest of us. And they also ask questions, essentially on behalf of the rest of the press corps, but also on behalf of the American people. What the White House did here is they decided AP, which is always in the pool, or had always been in the pool, should be kicked out because they were describing that body of water to the south of America as the Gulf of Mexico, but president Trump said it should be called the Gulf of America. So they were trying to make an example of the AP. It's been litigated extensively since then and is an ongoing case. Yeah, an AP, which is the Associated Press, which is this wire service that serves thousands of news outlets across the world. Essentially, the pool had always been decided by the press, by the White House Correspondents Association, of which I was a president for a year. So it was an independent group of journalists, a series of rotations to make sure that an independent group of journalists were asking the president questions were traveling with the president. Well, now like half the people are hand selected by the White House. There isn't that level of independence that there had been in the past. You mentioned that there is a level responsiveness from the White House press office, but that doesn't necessarily mean there's a level of transparency, right? I feel like there's popped up a lot in the last week as there's been this huge debate over the secret plane switcheroo, right? I think that that secret plane switcheroo is actually a symptom of this greater breakdown of the relationship. When the president goes on a secret trip, when something like this happens, the White House always loops in at least a very small group of journalists who are sworn to secrecy and and we've always kept the secret. And then once the danger has passed, the secret is revealed. It's reported because there were people there. There were journalists there who knew what was happening and who saw it with their own eyes. In this case, the White House undertook an incredible deception put journalists and administration officials on what amounted to a decoy plane didn't tell them and then went to extreme links to keep that a secret to keep it hidden for over a month, which is just a total breach of the way this is normally handled where you don't keep those kinds of secrets. Other presidents have had very different views of what the press secretary is for and the kind of relationship they wanted with the press, even though all of them have used the press at times as foils. No one has ever set out to really destroy the credibility of the fourth estate like Donald Trump. When it kind of gets at this idea of because the press secretary is directly connected to the president, the president's actions can sometimes put the press secretary in a bind. I think with Trump specifically, with how often he does stretch the truth, I think it puts all of his press secretaries in this tough position where they're often either trying to explain something that he tweeted in the middle of the night or trying to explain exactly why the number he mentioned is correct actually, even though all the news outlets are saying it's not correct. I feel like we saw this tam with Sean Spicer, right? Yeah, I mean, this is really the original sin of Sean Spicer's tenure as president Trump's first White House press secretary in the first administration. He comes out on the day after the inauguration and he is clearly being pushed out to make a statement to the press. It's a weekend and he comes out and he says this about the inaugural crowds. In accurate numbers involving crowd size, we're also tweeted, no one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration period, both in person and around the globe. And it was just very plainly not true and it became just a real problem for his tenure. If you come out on the first day and you say something that is plainly not true, then it really casts a shadow over what turned out to be a pretty short tenure as press secretary. This president's relationship with his press secretary has been fascinating because Spicer had this short tenure. Then Sarah Huckabee Sanders became press secretary and and she was seen as doing a good job. She definitely was very solid on running the office and maintaining the relationship with the press, but then she just stopped holding briefings. And for the last several months of her time as press secretary, she didn't hold a briefing. Then she was replaced by Stephanie Grisham, who in her book writes about going and getting sized for the podium because it moves up and down depending on the height of the person. So she got measured for the podium and then she never gave a single briefing. The White House daily press briefing went more than a year without happening until Kayleigh McEnany came along and she's much more likely a Caroline Levitt and that she was there to do combat and then after her time as press secretary, she went on to be a Fox News personality. Do you think that because of the way Donald Trump has changed the role of the press secretary that is kind of untethered from the facts basically become less important because of that? In other words, people don't tune in, they tune in for the theater for sure, but they don't tune in to get the straight story on anything. Honestly, they don't even tune in as much as they used to. It used to be must-see TV and you knew that President Trump was watching it too. And now it feels like it has taken on less vitality. And I think at least part of that is also because of what happened during the Biden administration. You know, they held briefings more frequently, certainly, but there was this sense under Karin Jean-Pierre that she wasn't always being particularly straightforward. She was coming out and giving answers that flew in the face of what people were seeing, like when she talked about President Biden not needing a cognitive exam. The President doesn't need a cognitive test. That is not my assessment. That is the assessment of the President's doctor. That is also the assessment of the neurologist who has also made that assessment as well. And, you know, and you've heard to say this and I'll reiterate this. The President's doctor has said, if you look at what this President, the President who is also the Commander-in-Chief, he passes a cognitive test every day. Every day, as he moves from one topic to another topic, there was an entire briefing of this. And I really do think that during that period, the briefings just took on sort of less, less value in part because she didn't have the President's ear. She wasn't in the room. It definitely was not must-see TV during that time. But in hindsight, it's very important because it shows the lengths to which the White House went to convince people that Joe Biden was fine and fit for office and not suffering any kind of decline physically or cognitively. Right. And it turned out that was not the case. Okay. We have to take a quick break, but more on all this in just a moment. And we're back. Samara, I want to start where we left off there with this lack of transparency from the Biden White House about the President's health a few years ago. Why do you think that was so consequential? It was so consequential because when it came out that President Biden had declined, and we also have that horrific performance in the debate, it just increased Americans' lack of faith and cynicism about all Democratic institutions. We know that voters give extremely poor marks to almost every single institution in America, including the White House, and the White House presents itself through the press secretary. This is not new. We had during the Vietnam War, what people called the five o'clock follies where military officials would talk about how great the war was going when it was really going very badly. And I think that one of the most important things in a democracy is that there is a certain amount of transparency and candor and credibility, and that means honesty. And this White House, the Trump White House has decided that that's not important at all. It's tempting to think, well, this all started with Trump because he has taken such a radically different approach to the presidency. But I wonder in recent history if there are other times proxies or similar situations, I guess, where we've seen press secretaries sort of push the limits on the truth when it comes to pushing the president's priorities. During the run-up to the Iraq War in the George W. Bush administration, the White House press briefing became one of many venues where the White House made the case for the necessity of that war by talking about the potential of Iraq to have weapons of mass destruction, which we now know did not exist. They did not have. There were no weapons of mass destruction as had been described. You know, we don't know exactly how much the administration knew at that moment or how much press secretary Ari Fleischer knew at that moment. But the White House briefing was one of the main ways that that war was sold to the American people. Which feels different more to how the Iran war is being sold to the American people if at all right now. Well, the Iran war is not that dissimilar. I mean, first in June of 2025, the president declared that Iran's nuclear program had been obliterated and the goal posts have changed sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. He said that he went to war to achieve certain goals. None of them have been achieved and he's changed the goals now to keeping the straight of hormones open. So I think that a relationship, a healthy relationship between the press and the White House that's based on as much candor as possible while the press secretary is still trying to communicate the president's message is an important part of a functioning democracy. This administration right now is not holding the regular Pentagon press briefings that you would expect during a time of war. Those just aren't happening. We've seen the consequences of that with the USS Abraham Lincoln where there are these reports coming in from family members saying that service members are in terrible conditions and then the White House and the Defense Department and everybody else in the administration is trying to dismiss that or say it's not as bad as it sounds and, you know, clear and transparent communication up front probably would have put them in a better position to speak to this very bad headline than they're in right now. And, you know, this administration has not held a lot of White House press briefings lately either in part because Caroline Levitt was out on a parental leave and she's just back, but also because you know, the president does talk all the time. He answers his phone somewhat regularly to reporters. They are not making the case for this. They are not selling this and this goes back to the very earliest days when the president basically announced that the country was at war with a video on social media. Do you think there's a political cost for that? I guess in terms of taking this different approach to actually trying to give information on a regular basis about a war that America is in versus what we're doing right now, Mara? Well, sure. That's one of the reasons Donald Trump's approval rating is below 40. But he might be a lame duck, but he's also not running again and that's very liberating. He has almost no constraints on him at all. Now, whether it has a repercussion for his party, we're going to find out in November. There is an issue here where voters of all stripes haven't really bought into this war because it was never really sold to them and there is not clear communication about what's happening and why even as we speak. There's another thing, which, you know, if you're just talking into your social media bubble as this president often does, there is a purpose that White House press briefings and questions from the press to serve in a functioning White House. And I learned this from Dana Perino, who was a press secretary for President George W. Bush. She is now also on Fox News and is a host of a couple of programs there. What she said is that a big part of the policy process should be in a meeting. They'd be talking about something they wanted to do and she would say, guys, how am I going to sell this to the press? How am I going to explain this? And if there's no fear of having to explain what you're doing, then you may do things differently. Accountability actually does have some value in creating better, more thought out policy. But what if Donald Trump doesn't care about that? You know, you could make the argument that he's been his own press secretary for his whole life. He's been bending reality, describing it the way he wants it to be and getting away with it. And remember, actually, at one point, he did pretend to be his own press secretary. Remember, his name was John Baron. And he called reporters on behalf of Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been engaged in this kind of, I don't even know what you want to call it, but giving his version of reality, which often doesn't conform to the facts for his entire career. All right, well, we can leave it there. I'm Miles Parks, I cover voting. I'm Tamara Keith, I cover politics. And thank you for listening to the Edgar Politics podcast.