Karoline Leavitt has spent much of her time at the White House lectern berating journalists for their questions—now one member of the media is hitting back.
On Wednesday’s episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC host excoriated Leavitt for her frequently wrong pronunciations of names and words.
Olbermann called Leavitt “belligerent, condescending, and aggressively stupid.”
“Her chief achievement is she doesn’t actually speak English,” he said. “She called Hitler Hilter. She has repeatedly mispronounced Trump’s name.”
“Last week she insisted Trump, or as she often calls him, Chump, deserves the Noble Peace Prize.”
The podcast host went on to play a compilation of Leavitt’s verbal flubs, which he referred to as “the Hall of Fame of Karoline Leavitt.”
“Leavitt clearly stopped learning around the sixth or seventh grade because she became convinced that at that point she knew everything,” the pundit said.
Earlier this week, Leavitt mispronounced “pundit” as “pundint” while she attacked TV journalists for not giving the president enough credit for his bilateral negotiations with Vladimir Putin.
In May, during an interview on Hannity, Leavitt also had trouble with the word “apprenticeships,” telling the Fox host that the US needs more “apprentinships.”
Outside of the way she speaks, Olbermann also critiqued Leavitt for the content of her interactions with the media.
“As I’ve pointed out several times, there is the word ‘lie’ in both her first and last names,” Olbermann said.
He also needled her for her tendency to bristle at pointed questions. The White House has sought to limit the influence of legacy media organizations like the Associated Press and CNN by giving space to right-wing outlets such as Real America’s Voice and The Daily Caller.
“Second, there’s the fact that in a room full of softball questions from right-wing plants, like the Pizzagate guy who was there the other day, she was literally a softball player who got a scholarship to play softball at an obscure college.”
Leavitt, who at 27 is the youngest person to serve as press secretary, played softball at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.
She joined the first Trump White House in 2019, right out of college, and ascended to the role of assistant press secretary by June 2020.
In the interim period between Trump’s administrations, she ran for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022. She did not win, but she accrued $300,000 in unpaid campaign debts, which she only disclosed to the Federal Elections Commission in January of this year.
President Donald Trump has expressed his admiration for Leavitt, saying that she has “lips that move like a machine gun” and that she is a “superstar.”
Olbermann would beg to differ.
The White House did not respond to an immediate request for comment.
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