In January, Trump appointed the 27-year-old Karoline Leavitt as his White House press secretary. This makes her the youngest press secretary in history and the highest-ranking member of her demographic to ever serve in the executive branch of the US government.

But Leavitt’s ascent to one of the most contentious governments in recent history is not one many can applaud as a win for feminism. It is difficult to comprehend a young woman being an ardent Trump supporter given his commitment to jeopardising women’s rights, but she has been since her college years during Trump’s first presidency.

Leavitt used to write pro-Trump op-eds in her Saint Anselm College newspaper defending the travel ban he imposed in 2017 that restricted certain foreign nationals from entering the US – predominantly targeting people from Muslim populations. In another article, penned when she was 19, she wrote, ‘The liberal media is unjust, unfair and sometimes just plain old false.’

She then started interning at Fox News and the summer before her final year she began interning as a writer in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. A place Leavitt returned after graduation, with a degree in communications and political science, to join the press office as an assistant press secretary under Kayleigh McEnany.

By 2022, Leavitt was running for the US House of Representatives in the first district of New Hampshire. By this point, Leavitt caught the attention and earned the support of right-wing figures like Lauren Boebert, a gun rights activist, and Ted Cruz, a junior senator from Texas who went up against Trump in the primaries in 2016. That September, she won the Republican primary but lost the general election to the Democratic incumbent, Chris Pappas, and did not run again in 2024.

In the run up to the election last year, Leavitt was already working closely with Trump again. In an appearance on CNN This Morning last June, she was removed from air for criticising the network’s debate moderators and saying it was a ‘hostile environment’ for Trump. When pushed back, Leavitt said Trump would be contending ‘with debate moderators who have made their opinions about him very well known… and their biased coverage of him’, ahead of his planned debate against then-president Joe Biden.

The CNN presenter Kasie Hunt defended her colleagues before trying to steer the conversation back on topic, but Leavitt refused to be deflected. It turned into a tense and awkward exchange that resulted in the interview being cut short. A month later, Leavitt gave birth to her first child with her husband Nicolas Riccio, a property tycoon more than 30 years her senior. And three days after giving birth, she turned on the TV to the news that Trump had survived an assassination attempt and vowed to go back to work.

‘I looked at my husband and said, “Looks like I’m going back to work”,’ she told The Conservateur in October. ‘The president literally put his life on the line to win this election. The least I could do is get back to work quickly.’

Unsurprisingly, Leavitt’s loyalty caught Trump’s attention and by November she was chosen as his official White House press secretary. He has called her ‘smart, tough, and a highly effective communicator.’ Even so, the task at hand is not an easy one – or an enviable one at that.

Most recently, Leavitt has had to deal with the fallout of the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, being accidentally added to a Signal thread where top US officials were discussing classified military plans (or ‘sensitive policy discussion’ as Trump has called it). Messages in the leaked chat revealed specific operational details of plans to bomb Yemen and have led to a public outcry about the leak of sensitive information under the Trump administration.

When the story first broke, the party line was that none of the information shared was classified – despite the apparent inclusion of information about the US strike on Yemen’s Houthi militia – but Goldberg has since released further proof. This includes messages from the text chat between the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, and top intelligence officials, including details of US bombings, drone launches and targeting information of the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions.

The messages also mention specific weapons to be used, timings for attacks and references to a ‘target terrorist’. The magazine said, ‘There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared.’

All of which has proven to be a communications headache for Leavitt. In a briefing on 26 March, she would not rule out that someone would lose their job over the Signal leak scandal. ‘What I can say definitively is what I just spoke to the president about, and he continues to have confidence in his national security team,’ Leavitt said.

Her commitment to Trump knows no bounds. She made that perfectly clear earlier this year when she spoke of the ‘lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family’ and added, ‘we will not accept that’.

Leavitt is, as previously mentioned, also straddling one of the most high-power communications roles in the world with new motherhood. Her Instagram is a testament to that feat. In one post she’s seen posing with Trump and Elon Musk in comedically large MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats, in another she shares a series of pictures of her young son, and in a third she smiles outside the White House carrying her baby with the caption ‘visiting mama at work’.

‘I have legitimately done my make-up while nursing my baby while talking on the phone prepping for my TV hit all at the same time,’ she told The Conservateur last year, ‘no man could ever do this.’ It’s clear that Leavitt has started the job as she means to go on – steadfast, unapologetic and fiercely right-wing. Whether she will remain in Trump’s favour long-term is another question – the president went through five press secretaries during his last term – but Leavitt seems determined to make an impact. Either way, she is certainly one to watch in US politics.