# Karoline Leavitt The **36th White House Press Secretary** and the youngest person ever to hold the job, serving from January 2025 until **August 27, 2026**. > [!important] No longer press secretary > Leavitt's departure was announced on **12 August 2026** and her last day was **27 August 2026** — days before this page was created. Any vault page describing her as the sitting press secretary is stale. She has returned to **[[MAGA Inc]]**, Trump's super PAC, where she previously served as spokesperson; Trump described her as becoming one of his top outside advisors. **Her successor was named on 9 October 2026: [[Katie Zacharia]]**, previously a senior communications adviser at [[Trump Media and Technology Group]] — leaving the podium vacant for roughly six weeks. ## The role Leavitt was 27 when she took the podium, arriving from the Trump campaign's communications operation after an unsuccessful 2022 House run in New Hampshire. Her tenure was defined by a deliberate restructuring of the briefing room itself rather than by any single exchange: the administration seated podcasters, streamers, and partisan outlets in the "new media" chair, and asserted White House control over the press pool that the White House Correspondents' Association had administered for decades. The stated reason for her exit was family — she has said she could not give the job the constant time and attention it demands while raising two young children. ## Why she matters for the KB The press secretary's job is a useful measure of an administration's information posture, and Leavitt's tenure is where the vault's [[Media Hub]] material meets its executive-power material. The substantive change was **credentialing**. Deciding who counts as press is a gatekeeping power that had been mostly delegated to the press corps' own association; moving it inside the building converts access into an instrument. That is the same structural move the vault tracks elsewhere — capture the mechanism rather than contest the output — and it outlasts any individual press secretary. Her return to [[MAGA Inc]] is also the revolving door in its short form: campaign communications → official government spokesperson → back to the super PAC, with the same message and a different legal wrapper. > [!warning] Thin page > This is a draft built to close a referenced-but-missing gap (7 inbound pages). It still needs the specific briefing-room credentialing changes with dates and the AP pool dispute. The successor gap was closed on 2026-10-10. ## See Also - [[Katie Zacharia]] — her successor, named 9 October 2026 - [[Donald Trump]] · [[MAGA Inc]] - [[Second Trump Administration]]