Friday, August 28 marked the last time White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt worked the briefing room podium — but the 29-year-old isn’t putting distance between herself and President Donald Trump. MAGA Inc. is where the exit she announced August 12, 2026, sends her back to; the super PAC sits on a roughly $400 million war chest, and that hoard has quietly become the engine of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party. That pile of cash is why Washington operatives keep asking a blunt question: why does a president who cannot run again need that kind of money?
A mother of two, Leavitt said she was leaving to spend more time with Niko, her two-year-old son, and Viviana, her daughter, three months. Both children she shares with her husband, real estate developer Nicholas Riccio, 60. Family, though, isn’t the whole story — she is also lining herself up to help map out the president’s future.
What exactly she will do at the super PAC has not been disclosed. She held a spokeswoman role there in 2023, before moving to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The operation waiting for her now, however, dwarfs the one she left and is richer, too, and a maze of linked dark-money groups surrounds it, making the cash hard to follow.
Leavitt told reporters on Friday, August 21, that she has no plans to vanish. “You guys will still see me all the time,” she said. Her return to MAGA Inc. is expected in September, timed to the Republican midterm convention.
The $400 Million Question
By February, filings show, MAGA Inc. had pulled in $305 million since Trump’s 2024 victory — about five times what any previous president had collected in the year after winning. The roughly $400 million it amassed heading into the midterms remains barely touched, and Republicans in competitive races are still waiting for the checkbook to open.
The August 25 South Carolina run-off drew one of the PAC’s biggest interventions of the cycle. Darline Graham, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, was the Trump-endorsed candidate the group spent more than $800,000 to boost.
Read the donor list and you get a directory of industries with billions riding on administration policy. Foris Dax, the parent company of crypto.com, tops it with about $35 million. The rest of the roster includes Kelcy Warren, the Texas pipeline billionaire; Jeff Yass, the billionaire TikTok investor; Greg and Anna Brockman, the OpenAI power couple; and the crypto twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, described by Trump as “male models with a big, beautiful brain.”
Waiting for her are colleagues including James Blair, the group’s current chief, who previously served as White House political director, along with veteran Trump strategist Chris LaCivita and pollster Tony Fabrizio. Trump built the fundraising machine himself, and he says the money answers to him. November may have little to do with the stockpile at all, according to the whisper among insiders: they suspect a Constitution-defying bid for a third term is what the president is quietly preparing, something he continues to raise as a joke.
An Empty Podium and No Front-Runner
No successor to Leavitt — not even a leading candidate — had been settled on as of August 26. One reason for the holdup, a White House official told The Independent, was the suddenness of her resignation, with Trump reportedly caught off-guard when she quit. Scott Jennings, 48, CNN’s resident conservative, is among the names floated. Quiet meetings between him and Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, have taken place since the vacancy opened, though sources say the final pick is unlikely to be him: parts of the MAGA movement loathe Jennings because he initially faulted Trump for the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Others in the mix include Trump’s former personal lawyer and failed U.S. attorney pick, Alina Habba, 41, who in a post on X pushed back on rumors she was in line for the job. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has a wife in contention, Katie Miller. The chief of protocol, Monica Crowley, a onetime conservative pundit, is another, as is Jason Miller, a former spokesman for Trump’s campaign, and Leavitt’s deputy, Anna Kelly. Senior administration officials are expected to rotate through the briefing room until a choice is made, as they did during Leavitt’s 11-week maternity leave.
From Intern to Youngest Press Secretary
Her career in Trump’s first term began as an intern in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, and by January 2021 she was an assistant press secretary. In 2022 she won the Republican primary in New Hampshire’s first congressional district, then lost to incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas. At 27, when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, she became the youngest person ever to serve as White House press secretary. Combative exchanges with reporters became the reputation she built there.
Her duties were set aside in late April 2026; Viviana arrived in early May, and by mid-July she was delivering her first formal briefing back at the podium. Repeated phone calls came from Trump while she was out, asking when she would come back — one factor, reportedly, in her decision to leave. Weeks before the announcement, Fox News aired her on the show hosted by the president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, where she talked about juggling work and motherhood and credited the president with supporting working parents.
On Truth Social, Trump wrote that “Karoline has been one of the best White House Press Secretaries in the History of the Office,” and said she would stay among his top outside advisers as Republicans fight for the midterms. On a replacement he has stayed publicly silent, apart from sharing an artificial intelligence-generated post casting himself as the best choice for the job.
The president also thanked her directly during a White House speech on Monday, August 24, streamed on Fox News. “And our press secretary, mother-of-two, and well, she decided she loved her children more than she loved Donald Trump,” he said. He went on to say he was “very upset” about her departure, adding: “She has to go home and spend time with her children. That does happen on occasion with some people when they love their children, and she does.”
Leavitt leaves at the end of a year of churn in the administration. Firings have claimed former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem since the start of 2026. Resignations, meanwhile, came from former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Todd Lyon, the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement head, amid scrutiny of their leadership. A conspiracy theory holding that an Air Force One decoy-plane betrayal drove her out was pushed, for its part, by the Iranian Embassy, though she was unlikely to have been aboard.
