The White House didn’t take long to hit back. Six minutes, to be exact.
That’s how fast Donald Trump‘s official attack account fired back Friday morning at a new report about who is really running his messaging now. What insiders described wasn’t flattering, and the comeback didn’t help.
It’s been almost a month since Karoline Leavitt walked away from the podium, and her job is still empty. People inside the building say that empty chair may explain one of the messiest weeks of Trump’s second term.
The report came from MS NOW White House reporters Jake Traylor and Akayla Gardner, who dug into Trump’s hunt for a new press secretary as his fights with the media heat up. Leavitt, 29, stepped down at the end of August, saying she couldn’t be the mom her two young children deserved while doing the job.
Since then, the role has sat empty for the longest stretch in American history, according to The Daily Beast. Briefings are rare now. Communications director Steven Cheung and former campaign spokesperson Danielle Alvarez have carried much of the load, while Vice President JD Vance and Attorney General Todd Blanche have each taken a turn at the lectern.
Insiders told MS NOW that the thinking in the building now comes down to one idea: nobody explains Trump better than Trump.
Two sources said that’s exactly how a ban on three major news outlets got out the door. Both said it wouldn’t have happened if Leavitt were still there, and that it caught some of Trump’s own senior staffers off guard.
“You’ve got to ask who’s around the president right now,” one of them told the outlet.
Trump announced the ban on Sept. 18 on Truth Social, barring CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House for reporting what he called “FICTION and LIES.” Later that day in the Oval Office, he blamed “cumulative stories,” adding, “You get sick of it.” The next morning, Secret Service officers turned reporters from all three outlets away at the gates and took their press passes.
It backfired almost right away. Five major TV networks pulled out of the rotating pool that covers the president, standing with the banned outlets. The three outlets sued, and early Thursday, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, ordered their access restored. He found the ban was likely unconstitutional because the outlets never got due process. Reporters were back on the grounds by midday.
So when Traylor summed up his story in an X post on Friday, the White House’s Rapid Response 47 account had a response ready: “All these clowns do is lie.”
A spokesperson also told MS NOW that nobody close to Trump was surprised by his move “to hold the fake news accountable,” adding that access “has always been a privilege.”
Neither response denied that the job is empty, or that the briefings have mostly dried up.
Plenty of people noticed that too. One X user listed the report’s main points (no press secretary, no briefings, and a media ban) and then asked, “Where is the lie?”
Another imagined life as “the intern at the lying office in the lying administration,” whose whole job is to “get on the lying app” and then get told, “to call somebody a liar.”
Even some Trump supporters wanted more than name-calling. “Which aides? They should be willing to go on the record,” one wrote.
Others shrugged off the vacancy altogether. “Isn’t this a kind of irrelevant job? Everyone sees everything online now,” one person wrote. Another admitted, “I miss Karoline,” but insisted Trump “will tap a replacement before long.”
That “before long” has been coming for a while. When Leavitt announced her exit in August, critics already predicted nobody would want the job. And just days after the ban took effect, the White House rolled out its own round-the-clock TV operation, more proof that the president would rather talk to the country without reporters in the room.
The MS NOW insiders aren’t the only ones who think Leavitt would have stepped in. Former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci said on The Hill’s “Rising” this week that Leavitt “would have told him not to do that, because it’s going to backfire.”
It did. And MS NOW’s sources say the bigger problem is that Trump paints with a broad brush when he speaks for himself, drawing heat from both sides of the aisle. With the Nov. 3 midterms less than six weeks away, that’s a risky habit for a White House with nobody at the podium to clean up after him.
For now, the administration’s official line is that the messenger is the problem. The empty podium says otherwise.
