White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt showed up prepared to spin, deflect, and move on — but a pointed question about President Donald Trump’s recent comments quickly turned the briefing into a pressure test she didn’t handle quietly.
At the daily press briefing Thursday, Jan. 15, two reporters reporters zeroed in on Trump’s latest offhand remarks — the kind that can’t be laughed off easily — and pushed Leavitt to explain whether the president was serious or just trying to talk his way out of another self-inflicted mess.
Trump on Tuesday, Jan. 6, during a speech to Republicans at the Kennedy Center as part of the GOP’s annual retreat, the President began dropping seeds of a startling option to “cancel the elections.”
He tried to characterize his comments as a diss on Democrats, according to Time Magazine.
“They have the worst policy,” he complained.
“How we have to even run against these people—I won’t say cancel the election, they should cancel the election, because the fake news would say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator,” the president whined.
He also grumbled about his polling numbers as his approval rating hovers around 40 percent, expressing worry that if the Democrats take back the House and Senate during the upcoming mid-terms they’ll “impeach him.”
“I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy,” Trump insisted.
“You gotta win the midterms. Because if we don’t win the midterms, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” he groused, Time reported. “I’ll get impeached.”
Then, in a closed-door interview with Reuters on Wednesday, Jan. 14, Trump again mentioned canceling the elections.
At the press briefing, Leavitt thought it would be an easy dodge telling one reporter who asked about the comments that the President was “joking.”
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“The president was simply joking,” Leavitt insisted. “Obviously, he was saying, ‘We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything the American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously.”
But the issue wouldn’t go away as another reporter pressed her again about what Trump meant when he mused about canceling the elections.
“You said that he was joking about canceling the elections, but Americans, for generations, have fought and died for democracy, for this democracy. Are you saying the president finds the idea of canceling elections funny?” The Independent reporter Andrew Feinberg asked.
That’s when Leavitt had had enough and snapped.
“Were you in the room, Andrew? No, you weren’t. I was in the room. I heard the conversation, and only someone like you would take that so seriously and pose it as a question that way,” she huffed.
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Social media called her out on it and said it’s clear the panic was setting in.
“The way they always seem to twist it around and make a snarky answer and never answer. The question is telling. It tells that the question hit a nerve and it’s truthful,” said one observer.
“He doesn’t joke,” Threads poster Ila Coretti pointed out. “Good god she’s vile,” a Threads user stated.
Another agreed, “I’m so sick of her arrogant, snarky attitude. She doesn’t deserve to be at the podium.”
Another furious viewer added, “It’s not just what she’s saying, it’s how she’s saying it. This is not the tone of someone who wants healthy discourse, it’s the tone of someone who believes what they say is totally infallible. She’s not there to answer questions, she’s there to make any question that could be percieved as being critical seem like it is dumb and/or irrelevant. I’m so sick of this administration being disrespectful to anyone who challenges their statements or beliefs. It’s like we’re going backwards.”
Another concern Democrats and Trump critics have is Trump continuing to insinuate he can run for a third term. U.S. Presidents can only serve two terms in office. The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution limits a president to eight years as commander in chief.
In an interview with NBC News last March, Trump said there were ways for him to stay in office and that he was “not joking.”
“A lot of people want me to do it,” he insisted to NBC. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
Trump said, “I like working” when NBC asked him if he wanted another term.
“I’m not joking,” he said before admitting it was too soon to think about it.”
But he was very clear that he actually had been thinking about and even discussing it with others.
“There are methods which you could do it.”
One of those being floated is that Vice President JD Vance wins the 2028 election, then steps aside for Trump — which is not constitutional — but the president refused to reveal to NBC what they were other than to say, “But there are others, too.”
