Karoline Leavitt, former Trump White House press secretary, said President Donald Trump holds women in unusually high regard and is an encouraging employer, in remarks that began circulating online Sept. 22, 2026. Speaking on Fox News personality Sean Hannity’s “Hang Out” podcast, Leavitt said, “In fact, sometimes I think he might listen to women a little bit more than men and I think that he just has such respect.”
In the same Sept. 22 episode, Leavitt said White House reporters privately apologized to her. She named no reporters and no outlets. Describing what journalists told her, she said: “I’m sorry I had to ask that today. My bosses really wanted me to ask that; they know it’s an unfair question.”
Briefing Room and the Press
Leavitt told Hannity there is “a performative aspect to the briefing room. In fairness, I think on both sides, right? But definitely with the press, and they have to do that because their bosses are demanding it,” adding that at some companies editors and executives “dictate” to reporters. She praised CBS under its right-leaning leadership, saying: “I think we’ve seen a lot of improvement with them. And again, we’re not asking for like positive puff pieces every day. Just fairness, truth, accuracy, just telling a story or writing about factual information.”
Hannity framed the conversation by suggesting press secretaries for other presidents never had the leeway Leavitt did to take on journalists to their faces in the briefing room. Leavitt said the style was not her own invention. “Well, in a way, I’m sort of emulating what he does, right?” she said, adding that she was simply speaking the president’s language.
Praise for a Former Boss
Her former boss appreciated those podium moments and tried to catch her briefings whenever he could, Leavitt said. She called Trump a great boss and “very uplifting to the people who work for him, very complimentary and very fun.” He enjoys watching people do well, she said, and likes handing them new opportunities.
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held the press secretary job Leavitt later occupied, were among the women Leavitt named as figures Trump elevated across both of his terms. The pattern, she argued, isn’t an accident.
The Claim Splits the Room
The claim immediately split the room. By Sept. 23, critics on X were circulating the clip with a different read, citing Trump’s long record of attacks on female journalists. They revived the 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording of Trump making lewd comments about women, which has trailed him through two presidential terms and which detractors still reach for as the first exhibit on the subject of respect. What followed was a short clip, a flood of quote-posts, and two camps that took completely different meanings from a single sentence.
A Sept. 23 piece in Jezebel noted that Leavitt did not mention former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, whom Jezebel describes as every high-profile firing from the second Trump administration so far, all women.
Leavitt, quoted by Jezebel, said of Trump: “There’s been moments, right, where we’re in a room full of men and it’s Susie and me and he would look to us for our advice.”
Leavitt, 29, was the youngest press secretary in U.S. history. She took the podium in January 2025 and stepped down in late August 2026 to move into an outside advisory role. She said Trump was supportive when she chose to resign.
Leavitt built her reputation on briefing-room friction, and the clashes made her a fixture on cable news and a lightning rod online. In her telling, those clashes were not something she invented for herself. She had borrowed the cadence, the bluntness and the willingness to name a reporter and go after the question rather than answer it. Most press secretaries use their post-podium interviews to smooth edges and explain context. Leavitt took the opposite route: she claimed the edges as the job’s whole point, and she credited the man who hired her with handing her the license to use them. The sharpest moments of her tenure, by her account, were an echo of the president’s own style — and he was watching. That management style is the throughline of her rise from campaign spokeswoman to the most visible speaking role in the building.
