Karoline Leavitt has been brutally mocked for claiming that her boss Donald Trump is the best-read person she knows.
The 28-year-old White House press secretary appeared at a Turning Point USA event at George Washington University in D.C. on Thursday with Erika Kirk, the widow of the group’s slain founder, Charlie Kirk.
While discussing how it’s important for her to keep up with the news, she took a detour, saying that despite striving to be the best-read person in any room, she keeps being outdone by one man: President Trump.
She claimed her boss was “always reading the papers,” despite his well-known dislike for reading, as reported by The Washington Post, and refusal to look at intelligence briefings.
“So my advice would be to encourage everyone in this room to try to be the most well-read person in every room that you’re in,” she said. “That was a piece of advice one of my predecessors, Dana Perino, gave to me before I took this job. She said, ‘You always want to be the most well-read person in the room.’”
She then veered off to pay her boss a quick compliment.
“And I try to be every day, but Donald Trump always is,” she said. “That man does not miss a story. Let me tell you, he’s always reading the papers and watching the TV. He doesn’t miss anything anyone says in the whole world. I don’t know how he does it and consumes it all. And it’s a lot.”
Leavitt used the TPUSA event to reveal what she herself reads at the office: the Daily Beast.
“When you go home to a beautiful baby and children who are just happy to see you no matter what, it is the most refreshing, beautiful thing, and it gives you the best perspective on life,” Leavitt told Kirk.
“Nothing else matters except for that,” she added. “Who cares what the Daily Beast wrote today? Who cares what the headlines are?”
Trump is known to monitor all the main news networks from his White House quarters, and even recruited his defense secretary from the Fox & Friends sofa.
Despite regularly dismissing vast tranches of the U.S. media landscape as “fake news,” Leavitt then told the students about the importance of reading widely and cross-checking stories.
“And, you know, you guys are busy, right? You’re students, you’re, you’re working, you’re in school, you want to have fun, you want to live lives, you can’t consume every piece of news,” she said.
“But before you get really hot and bothered about something or maybe angry or even really encouraged by something, check other sources and then use your best judgment to sort of balance what the truth is.”
Leavitt’s words have not been received well.
“Had I been drinking anything I would have spit it out from laughing… Leavitt is beyond hope,” said former tennis world No. 1 Martina Navratilova.
Sharing the clip, right-wing political commentator and think tank founder Richard Hanania said, “Jesus Christ. Their praise of him gets more ridiculous. Now they’re all talking about him reading everything and having an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East. He’ll be solving unsolved math problems by the end of his term.”
“This shameless a---kissing is even more pathetic since Trump was quoted as saying, ‘I always like to hang around with losers, actually, because it makes me feel better,’” said executive director of the New York Health Act campaign, Melanie D’Arrigo.
Political commentator Keith Olbermann called it “compulsive lying,” while author James Surowiecki said, “Karoline Leavitt has said many ridiculous things since she became press secretary, but ‘Donald Trump is always the most well-read person in the room’ is unquestionably the most ridiculous.”
In his 2018 book Fire and Fury, author Michael Wolff wrote that Trump “didn’t process information in any conventional sense... He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate.”
He also quoted an email from an economic adviser from Trump’s first term, Gary Cohn, saying, “It’s worse than you can imagine… Trump won’t read anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers, nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
“After several months, Trump made clear he was not interested in reviewing a personal copy of the written intelligence report known as the PDB,” a Post article from 2018 said.
It comes after Eric Trump unveiled plans for his father’s new “presidential library” in Miami, Florida. The mock-up featured a jumbo jet, a giant gold statue of Trump, a Star Spangled Banner with 56 stars, and not a book in sight.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Leavitt for clarification.
