White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt flooded social media the morning after President Donald Trump’s 108-minute State of the Union address, insisting it was a triumph and scrambling to frame the marathon speech as a major win.
On Wednesday, the 28-year-old “mouthpiece” of the Trump administration shared headlines—mostly from conservative-leaning outlets—highlighting the president’s supposed “wins” from a speech that at one point descended into a shouting match and made history as the longest State of the Union on record.
In over 30 posts shared within an hour, Leavitt quoted headlines portraying Trump, 79, only in a positive light, including Fox News’ description of a “SOTU packed with wins and warnings,” CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil’s praise of the speech as “extraordinary,” noting how it left “Democrats seething,” and then sprinkling in some of the president’s actual key policy proposals.
According to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, the reception to the president’s address was positive, mainly among a largely Republican audience, as viewers of the speech were about 13 percent more Republican than the general public.
Still, the poll found that 45 percent of the audience said Trump focused too little on the economy and the cost of living, even as Americans struggle with an affordability crisis the president has dismissed as a “hoax.”
During his speech, the president focused on lower gasoline and mortgage costs, prescription drug prices, and the rising stock market, and he praised his “roaring economy,” despite an AP-NORC poll earlier this month showing that only 39 percent of U.S. adults approved of his handling of the economy.
Many of the claims were fact-checked after the speech, revealing that real GDP growth in 2025 fell to 2.2 percent, unemployment slightly increased, and prices were not “plummeting downward” as Trump claimed, but were rising.
One of the most noteworthy moments of Trump’s address, also highlighted by Leavitt, focused on his immigration policies, which had been condemned just hours earlier as “detrimental to human rights” in a statement by America’s Roman Catholic bishops.
About 50 minutes into the address, Trump urged attendees to stand if they agreed that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens,” and he lashed out at Democrats who remained seated. He also used the moment to demonize immigrants and said he would ignite a “war on fraud” against Somalis in Minnesota.
At the prompt to stand, Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia and fled the country’s civil war as a child, began screaming, “You kill Americans,” at the president, an apparent reference to the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents.
In her long posting spree, the press secretary—who is known for defending the president and shifting focus when he is viewed unfavorably—did not note Trump’s lack of acknowledgment of his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, even though many of the convicted sex offender’s victims were present at his address.
“President Trump made some exciting policy announcements during his historic State of the Union speech that are all very popular with the American people,” Leavitt wrote on Tuesday, following another flurry of reposts from the Official White House Rapid Response account on X highlighting coverage of the address.
