Why Would Trump Say This About Karoline Leavitt?

President Donald Trump won’t stop fawning over the White House press secretary in the creepiest way possible.

Speaking to a gaggle of reporters on Air Force One after departing Egypt Tuesday, Trump asked, “How’s Karoline doing? Is she doing good? Should Karoline be replaced?”

As the journalists on board began to lightly protest, Trump cut them off. “It’ll never happen,” he said.

A smile slowly spread across the president’s face as he continued to muse over the questions from the press. “That face, those [inaudible], and those lips. They move like a machine gun, right?” he said.

The president, who has a tendency to repeat comments he considers to be clever, was rehashing a remark he’d made in August during an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty. Speaking about Leavitt, Trump remarked: “She’s become a star. It’s that face. It’s that brain. It’s those lips, the way they move. They move like she’s a machine gun.”

Setting aside that it’s a strangely sexual remark, it feels particularly inappropriate when directed at the 28-year-old Leavitt, the White House’s youngest press secretary to date.

Those outside of Trump’s world know that Leavitt isn’t doing so hot. Since the beginning of the month, she’s struggled to defend Trump’s outlandish claims about Democratic cities, publicly seethed over bad polls, and offered weak excuses for the president’s gleeful efforts to sack essential federal workers.

It’s clear from many of Trump’s remarks about the women around him that the most important thing they have to offer is their appearance—and this extends beyond his (mostly blonde) inner circle. Speaking about Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni Monday, the U.S. president called her “a beautiful young woman.”

“Now if you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the United States about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances,” Trump said of Meloni.

In an early taste of CBS News’s editorial direction under its newly anointed editor in chief, the anti-woke pundit Bari Weiss, the storied outlet elevated a hit piece on Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York City Democratic mayoral nominee.

CBS News on Friday published a segment featuring Olivia Reingold—a reporter for the Weiss-founded Free Press, which is now owned by the same parent company as CBS. Reingold, whose previous work for Weiss includes a much-criticized August story that attempted to downplay the Israel-induced famine in Gaza, shared her reporting on Mamdani on a CBS morning program.

“Some NYPD officers worry about Mamdani becoming the NYC mayor, The Free Press reports,” reads the title of the segment posted on CBSNews.com. (Until Monday, “Mamdani” had been misspelled “Mandani.”)

Reingold reported that officers in the New York Police Department are worried about Mamdani, with some “considering retiring.” The evidence? In total, her Free Press article contains quotes from four of the at least 33,000 uniformed officers serving in the NYPD. None of them are named.

One lieutenant was worked up over whether Mamdani is “going to cut a billion dollars out of our budget” and whether his caseload will “keep piling up while we just get more and more short-staffed.”

Mamdani has proposed reducing the NYPD’s overtime budget and establishing a Department of Community Safety to take on certain nonviolent situations in the city, thereby freeing up the department’s ability to focus on serious crimes.

Another was worried about a possible reduction in the department’s overtime budget. But not all NYPD officers would view reducing overtime negatively; according to The New York Times, many officers have actually quit their jobs because of the significant demands of compulsory overtime.

Another source of Reingold’s was a Republican cop who has been dissatisfied with the department’s direction since the tenure of Bill de Blasio, the city’s Democratic mayor from 2014 to 2021. The other interviewed officer said he plans on staying in the department but is concerned about its waning “culture of brotherhood”—though he did not directly attribute that to Mamdani’s expected election.

All told, the story is thinly sourced, fearmongering, tabloid drek. It elevates the voices of a handful of cops who happen to share The Free Press’s editorial line: hostility toward Mamdani’s election. It’s highly unlikely that CBS News would have published a story like this—one unquestionably elevating questionable reporting from a biased outlet—before Weiss took the reins last week.

Trump Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy thinks that those who attend No Kings protests this weekend are members of antifa.

“The ‘No Kings’ protest, Maria, really frustrating. This is part of antifa, paid protesters, it begs the question who’s funding it,” Duffy told Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Monday. “Democrats wanna wait for a big rally of a No Kings protest when the bottom line is, who’s running the show in the Senate? Chuck Schumer’s not running the show, the No Kings protesters or organizers are running the show. Is AOC threatening a primary against Chuck Schumer, is she running the show?”

He then went on to say that Schumer had surrendered all his power to the No Kings protesters.

Duffy calling the No Kings protests “antifa” is ironic given how tame they have been. They are peppered with veterans, federal employees, and mostly older, liberal white people of the #Resistance ilk. The rally is supported by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the College Democrats of America—not antifa, which doesn’t exist. But it’s clear that the Trump administration has no issue labeling any kind of organic, organized resistance to them as antifa, which they have labeled a terrorist organization.

Duffy’s comments were similar to ones House Speaker Mike Johnson made last week.

“We’re so angry about it. I’m a very patient guy, but I have had it with these people. They’re playing games with real people’s lives,” Johnson ranted last Friday on Fox News, in his usual monotone voice. “The theory we have right now: They have a ‘Hate America’ rally that’s scheduled for October 18 on the National Mall. It’s all the pro-Hamas wing and the antifa people, they’re all coming out. Some of the House Democrats are selling T-shirts for the event. It’s being told to us that they won’t be able to reopen the government until after that rally, ’cuz they can’t face their rabid base. This is serious business hurting real people.… I’m beyond words.”

Antifa be warned: The Trump administration is coming for you, but first they have to speak with some podcasters.

Conservative podcaster Glenn Beck insisted Monday that the FBI was turning over “every single stone” to locate members of the famously decentralized anti-fascist movement—a fact he became aware of when they allegedly arrived at his door to discuss a recent series he did discussing the supposed antifa network.

“We dove in head first, and we analyzed the Antifa network, and we went from the street thugs to the support groups and eventually to the funding. To say the FBI was interested in this might be an understatement,” Beck said. “It is so clear to me that they are exploring all angles of this and they are talking to anyone and everyone that can give them any kind of information.”

“How do I know? Saturday, I get a phone call,” Beck continued, recalling the conversation.

“‘The director would like to send over some agents to speak to you, Glenn.’ I’m like, ‘The director? FBI agents?’ ‘Yes, you said some things that they need to talk to you about.’”

The fact that Beck might catch FBI Director Kash Patel’s attention should come as no surprise, especially since Patel used to host his own conspiratorial political opinion show before he was tasked to run America’s lead investigative agency.

“They sat in my—three agents—sat in my living room for almost two hours,” Beck said. “It was surreal at one point.”

For years, Donald Trump and his allies have pushed the idea that violent, far-left radicals are wreaking havoc in cities across the country, but their rhetoric has been noticeably devoid of evidence. To quell the noise, members of the House Intelligence Committee asked the CIA and FBI in 2020 to investigate false intelligence campaigns and find proof of the anti-fascist group’s supposed “invasion.” Despite reports contradicting Trump’s rhetoric, the noise did not die down.

Last week, Trump designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that anti-fascists fail to commit a fraction of the violence that the far-right extremists they oppose do.

“Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” Trump’s order states.

But Trump’s action flouted the fact that he doesn’t have the authority to designate antifa as a terrorist organization—that power resides with Congress. And critics have warned that this could just be the beginning, as the White House works toward a broader crackdown on political opposition to its immigration agenda, as evidenced by Trump’s decision to send the National Guard to subdue alleged unrest in the hipster paradise of Portland, Oregon, or by the elevation of rhetoric that has lumped fervor against antifa with legitimate political parties, such as the Democratic Socialists of America.

President Donald Trump humiliated himself Monday at a summit of world leaders gathered to sign a peace agreement between Israel and Hamas.

The historic peace deal was signed in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, following the release of the remaining 20 Israeli hostages in Gaza, and the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israel, including 1,700 taken over the last two years and held without charges. While both sides have agreed to this first phase of Trump’s 20-point peace deal, it’s still unclear whether peace will persist.

While celebrating his momentary victory in front of his fellow world leaders, Trump spoke incoherently and made several embarrassing comments.

Speaking about being escorted to the signing on Air Force One by Egyptian military aircraft, Trump came across unintelligibly.

“But Air Force One was really—it was covered with Egyptian desert just a few months ago, if you think about it. Just a few months ago it was Egyptian desert, and now it was just a few feet off our window, and it was a spectacular sight, and I appreciate it very much,” said Trump.

It’s not clear what Trump was attempting to convey here. The U.S. president has a tendency to steer into meaningless remarks when speaking without a teleprompter. And that was only the beginning.

In a room full of world leaders the U.S. president claimed that his opinion was the only one that mattered, while directly praising Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has become something of a model leader for those on the contemporary right after he systematically weakened his country’s free press, replacing it with a state-controlled propaganda machine.

“You are fantastic, all right? I know a lot of people don’t agree with me, but I’m the only one that matters. You are fantastic,” Trump said. “He’s a great leader. I endorsed him in the last election he had, and he won by 28 points. You’re gonna do even better next time.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had a pained expression as she stood behind the babbling U.S. president. She looked particularly horrified as Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said he’d nominate Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, which the U.S. president lost last week.

In another cringeworthy moment, Trump turned his attention to Meloni to fawn over her appearance.

“We have a woman, a young woman, who’s uh—I’m not allowed to say it ’cause it’s usually the end of your political career if you say it. She’s a beautiful young woman. Now if you use the word ‘beautiful’ in the United States about a woman, that’s the end of your political career, but I’ll take my chances,” Trump said.

He added that Meloni was very respected in Italy. Clearly, he was not party to that respect.

Later, while patting himself on the back for his work on the peace agreement, Trump mistakenly called Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the “president” of Canada.

After Trump’s remarks, Carney was caught on a hot mic joking, “I’m glad you upgraded me to president!”

“Did I say that?” Trump laughed. He leaned in, adding, “At least I didn’t say governor.”