Karoline Leavitt Lashes Out at a Reporter for Asking About Putin

In response to a perfectly reasonable query from a New York Times reporter, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday lashed out at the paper while dodging the question.

Earlier, President Trump—who, in recent days, has conducted a bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a multilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders, and a one-on-one phone call with Putin—told Fox News that he’d stepped away from his meeting with the European leaders to speak with the Russian president.

“I didn’t [call Putin] in front of them. I thought that would be disrespectful to President Putin,” Trump said. “You know, I wouldn’t do that because they have not had the warmest relations.”

At a press conference later Tuesday, the Times’ Shawn McCreesh asked an obvious question: If the current objective of ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace efforts is to “get everybody on the same page,” then, “why wouldn’t Trump just take the call from Putin while the other leaders were in the room? He said it would be ‘disrespectful’ to do that. Why is it disrespectful?”

In response, Leavitt said, “With all due respect, only a reporter from The New York Times would ask a question like that, Shawn.”

Trump’s 27-year-old press secretary, who recently claimed that a Nobel Peace Prize for the president is “well past time,” went on to tout Trump’s diplomacy with Putin and the European leaders. (McCreesh’s question—however vapid Leavitt considered it to be—was left glaringly unanswered.)

Leavitt has a habit of verbally assailing reporters and condescending to them rather than answering their questions.

In March, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent asked about the government haphazardly classifying people as members of the gang Tren de Aragua based on their tattoos and clothing. “Shame on you,” she replied, “and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals who have—this is a vicious gang, Andrew!”

In June, Jasmine Wright of NOTUS asked Leavitt whether Trump would tolerate peaceful protest during his then-upcoming military parade, in light of the president warning that “any protester [who] wants to come out … will be met with very big force.”

“Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question,” Leavitt said.

Fellas, is it “woke” to say slavery was bad? President Donald Trump seems to think so.

The president unleashed a lengthy tirade Tuesday against the Smithsonian Institution, and all museums across the country, claiming that they were “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” Trump wrote. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

Trump has criticized education efforts that focus on racism and slavery since 2020. Instead, he prefers a white nationalist vision of the future of history that focuses on the role of white Americans above all others and diminishes the sins of slavery, segregation, and violence as mere bumps on the path toward a future that Americans ought to spend a lot more time celebrating.

In fact, the Smithsonian Institute celebrates a wide variety of accomplishments by a range of historical figures from different backgrounds. For example, the Tuskegee Airmen are immortalized alongside Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon at the National Air and Space Museum.

But Trump can’t seem to see past the variety of skin tones shown in the backward-looking lens of a history museum, and wants to tell a different, “brighter” story. Trump’s efforts to rewrite history are not only despotic, they’re plainly racist.

“I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” Trump said in his post.

Earlier this month, White House officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology,” threatening to yank funding if they refused. The memo accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” The White House had previously notified the Smithsonian of a White House initiative to ensure its museums’ “alignment” with a history-whitewashing executive order that Trump signed in March.

Clearly, the president considers teaching the reality of United States history to be fundamentally unpatriotic—when just the opposite is true.

The Trump administration no longer believes the crime statistics provided by the Metropolitan Police Department.

The Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into the Washington police department Tuesday to determine whether the law enforcement bureau had manipulated data to make crime in the city seem lower than officers have claimed, reported The Washington Post.

Donald Trump had highlighted the conspiracy the night before. “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, confirming the existence of the probe.

“This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!” he continued. “Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour!”

Trump deployed 800 National Guard members to Washington and federalized the capital’s police department last week to combat what he described as a crime-riddled hellscape. To justify the government infringement, the president pointed to rising crime rates, immigrant populations, and homelessness—though the figures he used were from 2023, before violent crime plummeted across the country.

More recent numbers from the Metropolitan Police Department told a remarkably different story: Crime in the nation’s capital was actually down 35 percent in 2024 compared to the year prior. The decline tracked with a nationwide crime drop that saw homicide rates plummet across the country. They have continued to descend this year.

“According to local police data, violent crime is down 27 percent over this time last year, with homicides down 11 percent,” reported the Post.

Those digits were sunny enough that FBI Director Kash Patel used them to pat the Trump administration on the back during a press conference last week, claiming that the “plummeting” homicide numbers were thanks to the president’s policies.

“We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history,” Patel said at the time, unraveling Trump’s rationale for forcing MPD and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital moments after the president announced the directive.

On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration had made nearly 400 arrests since the beginning of the operation. At least 160 of those arrests were undocumented immigrants, reported ABC News.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is no stranger to manipulating data. Another branch of the government—the Bureau of Labor Statistics—is on its own quest to cook up flattering jobs numbers after its July report indicated that the job market had steadily lost employment since Trump announced his “liberation day” tariff plan.

On Monday, President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic saying that he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to make a deal “for him,” to end the war on Ukraine. 

When a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday what led Trump to that conclusion, she offered a meandering nonanswer. 

‘Well, the president has learned a lot, which is part of the reason he opened up this dialogue,” Leavitt responded. “The previous administration who oversaw the beginning of this war refused to talk, and President Trump has always said ‘in order to learn, in order to move the ball forward with diplomacy and towards peace, you have to have open dialogue. And so that’s why the president has had several conversations by phone, and of course an in-person meeting last Friday with President Putin … he’s understanding what both sides want, what both sides are going to have to give up. And he has always said, ‘in order to get a good deal, both sides are going to have to walk away a little bit unhappy.” 

In short, Leavitt once again entirely avoided answering a very direct question. 

Putin has not significantly changed his behavior or goals recently, as far as we can tell. And he has consistently shirked the idea of a ceasefire, while continuing to batter Ukraine and encroach upon more of its territory. Any “deal” that happens under these circumstances would only leave one side “unhappy.”   

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was forced Tuesday to walk back Donald Trump’s claim that he had gotten Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Delivering a readout at a White House press briefing, Leavitt claimed that Putin had “agreed to begin the next phase of the peace process, a meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskiy” during a phone call with Trump the day before. Trump had made similar claims himself on Monday.

But when one reporter pointed out that Moscow hadn’t voiced any such commitment, Leavitt was left to explain that the Trump administration was still working to secure the second summit.

“The Kremlin seemed to indicate that Putin did not firmly agree to a bilateral. Did he agree to have a sit-down with just Zelenskiy on the phone yesterday?” asked a reporter.

“I can assure you that the U.S. government and the Trump administration is working with both Russia and Ukraine to make that bilateral happen as we speak,” Leavitt replied, before quickly moving on.

The Kremlin was quick to dump cold water on Trump’s meager wins from his meeting with European leaders this week. Following Putin and Trump’s purportedly productive conversation, Moscow released a statement claiming that the leaders had merely discussed “the idea of raising the level of Russian and Ukrainian representation in the negotiations,” and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also refused to commit to a meeting.

Trump said Monday that he “sort of” set up a meeting between the two leaders but added that ultimately, “they’re the ones that have to call the shots.” Still, the president hopes that a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy would be followed by a trilateral meeting, this time including himself.