LAST CALL

Karoline Leavitt Appears With Desperate Last-Minute Pitch

Donald Trump, were you watching how it’s done?

Donald Trump’s former press secretary has stepped into his shoes to deliver the final pitch to voters that the 80-year-old president might once have made himself.

Appearing on Fox News’ Hannity on the eve of the midterm elections, Karoline Leavitt went back to Trump’s 2024 playbook to warn of “extremist” Democrats and unrestrained immigration.

She even found something nice to say about Joe Biden, warning Sean Hannity’s viewers that the progressive Democrats rising through the party’s ranks make the former president look like a centrist.

“We saw how bad things were under Joe Biden,” Leavitt, 29, said. “He was moderate compared to the people who are on the ballot tomorrow.”

Leavitt’s appearance on Hannity stood in stark contrast to Trump’s own closing pitch earlier in the day at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, when the president spent more than 20 minutes talking about algae and drainage pipes before even addressing any of the actual issues voters care about.

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The former press secretary, who left the White House in August to spend more time with her young family, opened by claiming the Democratic Party had swung so far left it was unrecognizable.

“This is no longer the Democrat Party of JFK. This is no longer your granddaddy’s Democrat Party,” she said, flaunting the GOP’s favored shorthand for the party.

“This is a far-left extremist party that wants to open our borders, abolish prisons, abolish police, and open our country to unlawful, criminal, illegal aliens from all over this world.”

This sudden fondness for Biden marks a turn for Leavitt, given she spent the 2024 campaign hammering Biden, especially for undoing Trump’s border policies.

“President Trump’s policies created the most secure border in American history, and it was Joe Biden who reversed them,” she said in February 2024.

The attacks just kept coming after she took over the White House briefing room in January 2025. At a briefing last December, Leavitt cried about the “complete mess” Trump had inherited from Biden, while she frequently complained about “radical left Democrats in Congress.”

Last October, she went on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime to hit back at her predecessor, Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as Biden’s press secretary from 2022 to 2025. The show aired a clip of Jean-Pierre calling Leavitt “deplorable” on ABC’s The View. Leavitt responded that Jean-Pierre had worked “for the most incompetent president in history.”

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Leavitt reached for a familiar trope, framing Tuesday’s vote as a stand against ideologies Republicans have long used as cudgels.

“So go out, make your voice heard, say not here, not in America,” she said. “Are we going to allow communism? Are we going to allow socialism?”

The Democratic National Committee did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.

Leavitt’s pitch may have come too late. The final New York Times/Siena polls, released Sunday, have Democrats leading in all seven Senate battlegrounds, including deep-red Texas and Kansas.

Trump’s approval rating has cratered into the mid-30s amid his war with Iran. No president has limped into a midterm this unpopular since Harry Truman in 1946.

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But there is one catch, according to the Times’ chief political analyst, Nate Cohn: Democrats were far more keen than Republicans to pick up the phone for pollsters, so the numbers could still be off.

Also, Midterms have historically punished the party that holds the White House, a pattern that has Republicans scrambling to turn out their base.

Leavitt wrapped up with a blunt warning to Republican Party faithfuls who plan to sit this one out.

“You can’t complain if you don’t vote,” she said.

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