Karoline Leavitt steps down after defending Trump’s arts overhaul from the podium

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who spent much of her tenure defending the Trump administration’s overhaul of the country’s leading arts institutions, will leave her post at the end of August.

President Donald Trump announced the departure Wednesday in a Truth Social post, saying Leavitt would step down “so she can spend more time with her beautiful young children and family.”

He said she would become one of his “top outside advisors” and “an influential voice within the Republican Party” ahead of the November midterm elections.

Leavitt, 28, is the youngest person to hold the job and the first to give birth while serving. She had her second child, a daughter, in May and returned to the briefing room in July.

In a post on X, she called the role “the honor and adventure of a lifetime” and said she could not “be the best mom my two young children deserve” while meeting the position’s demands.

“Our country is facing an existential threat from an increasingly extremist Democrat Party that seeks to destroy everything great about America, and I believe it is incumbent upon all of us who care about this country to fight back against that threat,” she said. “My fight is entering a new phase, but it is far from over.”

Her roughly 18-month run is the second-longest of any Trump press secretary, behind Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She was the administration’s public face during the release of the Epstein files and the war with Iran.

She was also the voice the White House used while reshaping the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

After Trump fired the center’s board, installed himself as chairman and filled the trustees with loyalists, Leavitt said in a February 2025 statement to The Wall Street Journal that “the Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke.”

Trump and the new board, she said, were “devoted to rebuilding the Kennedy Center into a thriving and highly respected institution where all Americans, and visitors from around the world, can enjoy the arts with respect to America’s great history and traditions.”

Ticket sales at the center dropped by roughly half the week after the takeover, the Washington Post reported. Performers including Ben Folds, Shonda Rhimes and Renée Fleming stepped down from their roles, and the musical Hamilton pulled its scheduled run.

Ahead of a March 2025 tour of the center, Leavitt said in a press briefing that Trump hoped “to restore arts and culture that embrace American tradition, don’t disparage it, as we have unfortunately seen over the past several years.”

The president, with his “business developer mind,” would weigh in on “future plays, and musicals and theatrical programs,” she said.

In December, the Trump-appointed board voted to add the president’s name to the institution. Leavitt announced the vote on X, saying the board had “voted unanimously to rename the Kennedy Center to the Trump-Kennedy Center, because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building.”

“The building will no doubt attain new levels of success and grandeur,” she said.

The vote drew immediate objections. Members of the Kennedy family and congressional Democrats said federal law bars renaming the memorial without an act of Congress.

Leavitt also weighed in on the center’s programming. When The Atlantic reported in March 2026 that comedian Bill Maher would receive the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, she told CNN and other outlets: “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.”

Less than a week later, the center announced Maher as the recipient.

Her disputes were not limited to the Kennedy Center.

In March 2026, after The New York Times published a critical assessment of the planned White House ballroom quoting a trained architect, an urban-planning writer and someone who had studied fine arts, Leavitt dismissed the critics on X as “three random people who have ‘studied fine arts,’ ‘long written about urban planning,’ and never built anything.”

Trump and his lead architect, she said, “have built world-class buildings around the world.”

The administration’s skepticism of cultural spending ran through other agencies as well. In April 2025, Leavitt promoted the Environmental Protection Agency’s closure of a museum at its headquarters, describing it in a press briefing as a museum “the Biden administration built to tell a selective story about the EPA’s history and climate change.”

The EPA said in a press release the museum cost $4 million to build and $600,000 a year to run.

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