White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is trying to curry favor with her boss after President Donald Trump exploded on her during a press briefing over his tanking poll numbers, throwing her under the bus at the time and suggesting that he has “bad public relations people.”
But a cringe-worthy post she wrote on X on Feb. 8, meant to regain his confidence, backfired on her and him, turning them into a laughingstock.
In that press briefing on Jan. 20, a year after Trump took office for the second time, the president made false statements about how he’s brought prices down and how the affordability crisis so many middle- and low-income Americans are struggling with isn’t real.
Then he blamed Leavitt, claiming his low poll numbers are a result of framing in the press by his communications team.
“I mean, I’m not getting — maybe I have the bad public relations people, but we’re not getting it across. We inherited high numbers, and we brought them way down,” Trump duplicitously insisted as Leavitt sat to his right.
And this after Leavitt has been Trump’s biggest defender over the past year, spending weeks and months aggressively going to war for Trump from the briefing room, repeatedly touting his supposed accomplishments — even when her boasts directly contradict economic data and lived reality.
In her new post showing three different pictures of Trump interacting with reporters, Leavitt is clearly trying to compliment Trump and brag about how “transparent” he is, but the ploy accidentally went sideways on both of them.
“Honored to serve as the Spokeswoman for the most transparent President in history!” she gushed in the caption before linking to a New York Post story on Trump’s dealings with journalists during the first year of his second term.
“’Trump nears 500 press interactions in second term, blowing past Biden, data show,’” Leavitt quoted the Post.
A furious response to Leavitt’s deceptive social media post about “transparency” and the impressive number of exchanges Trump has had with journalists showed her crowing went over like a ton of bricks.
“’Press interactions’ aren’t transparency. Dodging questions on camera isn’t honesty. It’s performance,” an X user proclaimed.
This social poster pointed out the obvious, “How about those Epstein file redactions? How about his taxes? Very transparent.”
Trump opponents say he’s one of the least transparent presidents in recent history. Stonewalling over the Epstein files since retaking office and refusing to release his tax returns during his first term are just a couple of examples.
The X account White House Xray went into more detail over how Trump has tried to manipulate and suppress the media, including the arrest of two reporters covering the Minneapolis ICE protests last month.
“’Most transparent’? More like most theatrical. This admin confuses press access with press control—a magician’s trick where visibility masks manipulation.” the post began.
The laundry list included, “While boasting of 500 interactions, they seized press pool control (Feb 2025), barred AP for rejecting propaganda terms, and restricted West Wing access (Oct 2025).”
It continued, “Simultaneously, they decommissioned the police misconduct database and moved FOIA online-only to throttle scrutiny. The ‘interactions’? Mostly staged gaggles—59% in the Oval Office, where Trump’s 300k fentanyl lie (Jan 2026) sailed unchecked. True transparency dies when loyalty gates the truth.”
Others piled on.
Another wrote, “Good grief. Your soul must be in real pain with all the cognitive dissonance.”
“Most transparent, is a stretch. 500 press interactions don’t equal honesty, it just means a lot of talking, dodging, and spin. Transparency is about what’s revealed, not how often the mic is handed to you,” X user DeBright pointed out.
According to data highlighted by the New York Post, Trump’s team has been aggressively pushing the narrative that he is more accessible to the press than any recent president. Citing figures compiled by political scientist Martha Kumar, the Post reported that Trump logged at least 493 exchanges with journalists during the first year of his second term — more than double the 246 interactions recorded during the same stretch of his first term.
The tally includes 153 interviews, 327 informal question-and-answer sessions, and 13 formal press conferences between Inauguration Day and Jan. 20, putting his daily rate above two media engagements per workday.
The Post also noted that Trump’s pace outstripped his predecessors, including Joe Biden’s 266 first-year exchanges and the sub-one-per-day averages of Barack Obama and George W. Bush. Even Bill Clinton’s 1.4 daily interactions fell short of Trump’s current clip, a data point Leavitt appeared eager to amplify as proof of her boss’s transparency.
But as critics noted loudly to her viral post, Trump’s access is another avenue for them both to spew falsehoods.
Just last week, Trump couldn’t keep his story straight over a federal raid on an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Blaming U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi for the presence of National Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the raid.
And after Trump posted a racist meme of the Obamas last week, he blamed a staffer, claiming he never saw the end of his own post and Leavitt only doubled down instead of clarifying.
Great Job Shelby E. & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star for sharing this story.
