White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is stepping down at the end of August, President Trump announced Wednesday, saying she was “one of my most trusted aides” and would continue as an outside adviser.
Leavitt, 28, said in her own statement that she could not be “the best mom my two young children deserve” while continuing in the role. She recently returned from maternity leave following the birth of her second child.
The announcement came a day after the Washington Post reported that Trump had secretly switched planes leaving Turkey last month, after officials flagged a credible assassination threat from Iran. Trump publicly boarded the older Air Force One in Ankara, then slipped out through a catering truck to a third aircraft, the C-32A, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and aides Natalie Harp, Dan Scavino and Walt Nauta.
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Read: A Catering Truck Secretly Carried Trump to Another Aircraft for His Exit From Turkey
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, White House communications director Steven Cheung, staff secretary Will Scharf, other White House staff, and the press pool remained on the original plane, unaware the president was no longer aboard.
While Leavitt was still on maternity leave through mid-July, more than a week after the Ankara trip, and did not return to the briefing room podium until July 16, many have since tied the two stories together, suggesting Leavitt’s resignation followed her discovering she’d been left on the decoy flight.
What she did do is defend the decoy flight on Tuesday before her departure was announced. She reposted a clip of Trump waving off the threat to those left behind, saying only that he’d been told to switch planes and “did what they say.” The repost drew immediate backlash, with replies accusing Trump — and by extension Leavitt, for defending it — of dismissing the danger to the staff and reporters actually left on the endangered aircraft.
Leavitt’s departure closes out just over 18 months in the role, the second-longest tenure of any Trump press secretary after Sarah Huckabee Sanders, now Arkansas’s governor.
Trump has not named a successor, and White House officials said Wednesday it remained unclear internally who would take over. The administration skipped naming an interim press secretary during Leavitt’s maternity leave earlier this year too, instead rotating officials like Vance, Rubio and Bessent through the podium in her absence.
