Karoline Leavitt, youngest White House press secretary, to make briefing room debut
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(WASHINGTON) — White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt will make her debut at the first press briefing of President Donald Trump’s second term on Tuesday, making history as the youngest in her role to stand behind the podium.
“I look forward to taking the podium into answering questions from all of the voices in the media. They are welcome to cover this White House. We will give them honest and accurate information, and I look forward to doing that,” Leavitt said in an interview with Newsmax on Thursday.
When Leavitt, 27, walks out into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room on Tuesday, she’ll be the youngest press secretary to do so, since Ronald Ziegler, who held the title in former President Ronald Reagan’s White House at age 29.
She’s said she would ditch the traditional notes binder that her predecessors in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including during Trump’s first term, would carry with them to press briefings.
“I might bring some notes with me, but my binder is in my brain because I know President Trump’s policies, and we have truth on our side at this White House,” she said on “Fox and Friends” the morning after Trump’s inauguration.
Leavitt most recently served as Trump’s spokesperson during his 2024 presidential campaign and his transition and previously worked in his first administration and for GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik, whom Trump has since named U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
“Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator,” Trump said in a November statement naming Leavitt press secretary. “I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, Make America Great Again.”
Leavitt has not committed to daily briefings, which grew heated during the first Trump term, with a revolving door of press secretaries, including Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kayleigh McEnany, going back and forth with reporters. Stephanie Grisham did not hold a press briefing in the nine months she was press secretary.
“We hope there will be decorum, certainly, and we will try to instill that. But we’re not we’re not shy of the hostile media,” Leavitt said on Fox News in November.
Before joining Trump’s campaign in 2023, Leavitt ran for Congress in a competitive district in her home state of New Hampshire, winning a competitive Republican primary that included fellow Trump administration alum Matt Mowers. Leavitt went on to lose the general election to Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas by nine points.
And at the start of the new Trump administration, Leavitt, in a flurry of new Federal Election Commission filings, revealed she accumulated more than $210,115 in donations that she not only failed to refund to her supporters for at least two years but also did not disclose the failure as required under federal election law.
Despite making history as America’s youngest press secretary, and vowing to buck some traditions, she joins the streak of moms serving as the U.S. president’s chief spokesperson, following Sanders, Grisham, McEnany, and President Joe Biden’s aides Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre.
“I wish her the best of luck. This is a great job, an amazing opportunity to be standing at this podium, behind this lectern, to go back and forth with all of you and– and speak on behalf of this president, the president of the United States,” Jean-Pierre said of Leavitt earlier this month during her last briefing. “There’s nothing like it. And, and I hope she enjoys the job.”
(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that cuts to Social Security and Medicare won’t be part of the legislative package being worked out to fund President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda.
“No, the president has made clear that Social Security and Medicare have to be preserved,” Johnson replied when asked if he was open to cutting the programs as part of the spending plans being worked out between House and Senate Republican leaders. “We have to look at all spending while maintaining… The Republican Party will not cut benefits.”
Johnson said he was to meet with Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Tuesday to discuss ideas for a funding package that Republicans plan to pursue through “reconciliation” — a fast-track process limited to spending and revenue legislation that needs only a majority rather than the 60-vote threshold in the Senate needed to pass legislation. Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House and a 3-seat majority in the Senate.
Congressional Republicans have yet to decide on a reconciliation plan. Johnson is pushing Trump’s desire for “one big, beautiful bill” to fund his agenda but Senate leaders and some conservatives in the House prefer that it be divided into two pieces of legislation.
The negotiated package is expected to include several of Trump’s top priorities, which include extending the tax cuts passed during his first term and addressing his immigration reforms, including more funding for Border Patrol and ICE. Trump has also pushed Congress to increase or eliminate the debt limit, though details of any plan remain unclear.
Trump reiterated his preference for one bill when he spoke to reporters on Tuesday, but said he could live with two.
“Well, I like one big, beautiful bill, and I always have, I always will, he said. But if two is more certain, it does go a little bit quicker because you can do the immigration stuff early.”
Before Trump spoke, Johnson said he remains convinced that the one-bill strategy is the “best way to go.”
“I’m meeting today with Leader Thune about the two ideas,” Johnson told reporters outside a closed GOP conference meeting Tuesday morning. “We still remain convinced over here that the one-bill strategy is the best way to go, but there’s some senators who have different ideas.”
“They’re all dear friends and colleagues, and we’re going to work on this together. We will get the two chambers united on the same strategy. And I think the president still prefers ‘one big, beautiful bill,’ as he likes to say, and there’s a lot of merit to that — we could talk about the ins and outs of that maybe at our leadership press conference here.”
Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso said one of the key objectives in the meeting with Trump will be attempting to forge a clearer path on reconciliation.
“He’s going to be with Senate leadership as well as the entire Senate conference to talk about that exact thing tomorrow and how we get on the same page with the House,” Barrasso said.
Barrasso said a two-part plan that would deliver wins for Trump early in his presidency and allow for more time to address tax policy that doesn’t expire until the end of the year, but the “goal is the same.”
“It was a suggestion by John Thune — this was before Christmas — he said ‘Let’s get an early win on the border.’ It was an issue in the election and it is a big issue for the American people and it is a big issue for national security, and we just thought we could get that done in a quicker fashion with a focus on that, on taking the handcuffs off of American energy as well as military strength, and then have the longer time to work on the financial component of this,” Barrasso said. “This issues and the urgency of the tax issue doesn’t really come into play until l the end of the year to the level that these other issues have the higher urgency right now.”
Johnson also said he intends to handle the debt limit — another Trump priority — in the reconciliation process, which Republicans could try pass in both chambers without Democratic support.
“That way, as the Republican Party, the party in charge of both chambers, we again get to determine the details of that. If it runs through the regular order, regular process… then you have to have both parties negotiating. And we feel like we are in better stead to do it ourselves,” he said.
Johnson said members will have “lengthy” sessions to go over the plan for reconciliation since there are “broad opinions” on how to handle it.
“Republicans in this majority in the House and Senate – our intention, our mission is to reduce spending in a meaningful way so we can get, restore fiscal sanity… so raising the debt limit is a necessary step so we don’t give the appearance that we’re going to default in some way on the nation’s debt,” he added.
Johnson said this does not mean Republicans will “tolerate” spending more to the new debt limit because the “commitment” is to reduce spending, but the final formula has not been determined.
The speaker also told reporters that he’ll likely speak with Trump on Tuesday, ahead of the president-elect’s visit to Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
“I’m sure I’ll speak with him today, probably this afternoon, and when he’s in town, I’m sure we’ll get together,” Johnson said. “He and I both have a very busy schedule. He’s trying to jam a lot into that visit on the Hill, so we’re sympathetic to that.” Johnson said.
Johnson said there will be more discussions on Trump’s agenda when he meets with House Republicans at Mar-a-Lago this weekend.
“He’s bringing in big groups of House Republicans to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend three days in a row to meet with and talk with all of our team members about what’s ahead of us and the challenges and how we can accomplish all this together. So we’re very excited about that. The president-elect is excited about it, and we all are as well,” Johnson said.
Senate Republicans are preparing to meet with President-Elect Trump in the Capitol tomorrow, and one of their key objectives will be attempting to forge a clearer path about how to proceed with advancing Trump’s agenda through a fast-track budget tool called reconciliation, Republican Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo. said.
“He’s going to be with Senate leadership as well as the entire Senate conference to talk about that exact thing tomorrow and how we get on the same page with the House,” Barrasso said.
Barrasso said today that the “goal is the same” regardless of whether Congress ultimately proceeds with a one-part bill, as Speaker Johnson and Trump have suggested, or with a two-part strategy championed by Majority Leader Thune.
But he made the case for a two-part plan that would deliver wins for Trump early in his presidency and allow for more time to address tax policy that doesn’t expire until the end of the year.
“It was a suggestion by John Thune — this was before Christmas — he said ‘Let’s get an early win on the border.’ It was an issue in the election and it is a big issue for the American people and it is a big issue for national security, and we just thought we could get that done in a quicker fashion with a focus on that, on taking the handcuffs off of American energy as well as military strength, and then have the longer time to work on the financial component of this,” Barrasso said. “This issues and the urgency of the tax issue doesn’t really come into play until l the end of the year to the level that these other issues have the higher urgency right now.”
Senate Republicans have slightly more breathing room on these measures than their House colleagues as they have a 3-seat GOP majority. In the House, Johnson might only be able to afford to lose a single Republican, so his preference for one large bill appears to be focused on getting his members together.
“If you put a number of high priority issues together, then people are more apt to vote for the larger package, because even though there may be something in it that doesn’t meet their preference, they’re not going to be willing to vote against the larger measures that are such, such high priority for the American people and for President Trump,” Johnson told Newsmax on Monday.
(PALM BEACH, Fla.) — President-elect Donald Trump declared in a left-field proposal on Tuesday that his administration will rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” in his latest attack on Mexico.
“We’re going to change because we do most of the work there and it’s ours,” Trump said. “It’s appropriate, and Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country,” Trump said in a long, winding news conference.
Trump criticized Mexico for the increase of drugs into the U.S. and said that he would make Mexico and Canada pay through “substantial tariffs.”
“We want to get along with everybody. But you know … it takes two to tango,” he said.
The gulf has been identified by several names throughout its history, with “Golfo de Mexico” first appearing on maps in the mid-16th century when Spain occupied the areas now known as Cuba to the south, Mexico to the west and the the U.S. states that surround it to the North.
It’s the ninth-largest body of water in the world and covers some 600,000 square miles.
Trump’s promise to rename the gulf isn’t the first.
In 2012, then-Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland proposed a bill that also would have renamed the gulf into the “Gulf of America,” however the Democrat backtracked and said he was joking and using it as a way to criticize his Republican colleagues over their anti-immigrant stances.
“They are trying to really discriminate against immigrants, which offends me severely,” Holland told ABC News in 2012. “I just thought if we’re gonna get into it, we might as well all get into it, it’s purely tongue and cheek.”
Stephen Colbert suggested the same name during the 2010 BP oil spill on his Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report.”
(WASHINGTON) — ABC projects that Democrat Adam Gray will win the race for California’s 13th Congressional District, unseating incumbent Republican John Duarte and flipping the final unresolved seat in the 2024 election.
With all 435 House races projected, ABC News estimates Republicans will hold 220 seats and Democrats 215 in the 119th Congress.
“People are excited about what we were able to achieve in electing another Republican House majority, keeping the majority,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday morning.
But it’s not clear how vacancies — or, illness or other absences — will impact the day-to-day division of power when the House convenes on Jan. 3.
President-elect Donald Trump initially tapped three House Republicans for positions in his upcoming administration: Florida Reps. Matt Gaetz and Mike Waltz, and New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Gaetz has already resigned from Congress and withdrew last month from consideration to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general. And though he won reelection to his seat last month, he said he won’t serve another term.
Republicans could have a 217-215 majority while their seats are vacant — the narrowest GOP majority in history — and special elections to fill those seats can take months to complete.
In this case, any single Republican can hold Johnson’s agenda hostage: Losing just one Republican on a vote would result in a 216-216 tie.
But several elderly Democrats have missed votes recently, which could give Republicans a little more breathing room next year.
In California’s 13th District, Duarte conceded to Gray on Tuesday, according to the Turlock Journal.
“I’m a citizen legislator, and I didn’t plan on being in Congress forever,” Duarte told the newspaper. “But whenever I think I can make a difference, I’ll consider public service in different forms, including running for Congress again.”
Gray released a victory statement on X Tuesday evening, extending his gratitude and saying the “final results confirm this district is ready for independent and accountable leadership that always puts the Valley’s people ahead of partisan politics.”
-ABC News’ Marilyn Heck and Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.
