Donald Trump Gives Karoline Leavitt The Pam Bondi Treatment With Icy Insult

Donald Trump tossed some shade at Karoline Leavitt during a press conference. The incident came when the president held a White House briefing on January 20, which was the anniversary of his first year in office during his second term. In his speech to the press, Trump boasted about his accomplishments as POTUS and insisted that he had done great work after taking over from Joe Biden's administration. "We've had the best stock market in history, the best 401Ks in history. And we inherited a mess," Trump said before wondering out loud why some people had bashed his administration's work. "Maybe I have bad public relations people, but we're not getting it across. We inherited high numbers, and we brought them way down," he added. Trump's comment about "bad public relations people" came while Leavitt, his press secretary, was seated nearby after introducing him to the media.

The open jab at Leavitt and his PR team came not long after Trump took an icy dig at Pam Bondi. Just over a week earlier, The Wall Street Journal published an article where insiders claimed that the commander-in-chief was growing impatient with the attorney general's inability to build a case against former FBI director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James. According to the January 12 WSJ piece, Trump was so frustrated by Bondi's lack of results that he described her as "weak and an ineffective enforcer of his agenda." That led to rumors that Bondi might resign from her position as attorney general or get fired by Trump.

Prior to both of those remarks, Trump had brought up the topic of a possible replacement for Leavitt.

When speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One in October 2025, Donald Trump floated the idea of replacing Karoline Leavitt as his press secretary — although it was all done playfully. "Should Karoline be replaced?" he rhetorically asked a gaggle of reporters. "It'll never happen," Trump added with a sly grin spread across his face. Unable to let the topic rest, POTUS decided to heap praise on the White House press secretary's facial features. "Those lips, they move like a machine gun," he told the press. That, of course, was not the only time Trump mentioned Leavitt's "machine gun" lips.

Just a month before he took a dig at his "public relations people," Trump heaped praise on Leavitt at a presser by saying that her rapidly moving mouth was a force when speaking on his behalf. Unfortunately, the president couldn't stop at simply acknowledging Leavitt's work with the media. "When she gets up there with that beautiful face and those lips that don't stop — bop, bop, bop, like a little machine gun," Trump said at a rally in December 2025. "She's got no fear," he added.