Karoline Leavitt, former Trump White House press secretary, said President Donald Trump may listen to women more than men, in remarks on Fox News personality Sean Hannity’s “Hang Out” podcast that began circulating online Sept. 22, 2026.
Leavitt portrayed Trump as an encouraging employer who holds women in unusually high regard. The portrait immediately split the room.
A Borrowed Briefing Room Style
Hannity opened the conversation with a premise about the briefing room: other presidents’ press secretaries, he suggested, were never given the latitude that Leavitt enjoyed to confront reporters directly. Leavitt answered that the combative style wasn’t her own invention, and that she was speaking the president’s language.
“Well, in a way, I’m sort of emulating what he does, right?” she told Hannity.
Her former boss appreciated those podium moments, she said, and made a point of catching her briefings whenever he could. She described Trump as a great boss and as “very uplifting to the people who work for him, very complimentary and very fun.”
Trump enjoys watching people do well and likes handing them new opportunities, Leavitt said — a management style she framed as the throughline of her own rise from campaign spokeswoman to the most visible speaking role in the building. She named women she said Trump elevated across both terms: Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Kellyanne Conway, who served as counselor to the president; and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held the press secretary job Leavitt later occupied. None of that, she argued, happened by accident.
In the same episode, Leavitt said, “There’s been moments, right, where we’re in a room full of men and it’s Susie and me and he would look to us for our advice,” adding, “He definitely listens, and he appreciates our ability to be candid with him.”
She also said “there’s a performative aspect to the briefing room,” and described her dealings with reporters this way: “There’s been times reporters have even said to me, ‘I’m sorry, I had to ask that today. My bosses really wanted me to ask that.’ They know it’s an unfair question, but they’re not in control of their own livelihood. They are dictated by the editors and the execs at some of these companies.”
Critics Point to the Record
Pushback arrived fast. By Sept. 23, critics on X were circulating the clip alongside a competing interpretation, one that cited Trump’s long record of attacks on female journalists. Those critics also dug the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape back up, in which Trump made lewd comments about women. The recording has trailed him through two presidential terms, and his detractors still reach for it first on the subject of respect.
A Sept. 23 Jezebel piece noted that the high-profile firings of the second Trump administration so far, as the piece described them — former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — were all women.
The exchange was a small, self-contained internet storm: a short clip, a wave of quote-posts, two camps hearing entirely different things in the same sentence. A press secretary normally uses the interviews that follow a stint at the podium to soften the sharp moments and supply context. Leavitt took the opposite tack, treating those sharp moments as the entire purpose of the job and giving the man who hired her credit for granting her permission to deploy them.
No Replacement Has Been Named
Leavitt left her post on Aug. 27, about two weeks after Trump announced her departure, and announced she would return to work for the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc.
As of a Sept. 29 report, no replacement for Leavitt had been named. Vice President JD Vance filled in for a White House press briefing on Sept. 3, and Attorney General Todd Blanche took reporters’ questions from the Rose Garden on Sept. 15.
Leavitt has been pitching a tell-all book about her White House tenure to publishers, according to unnamed sources cited by Page Six Hollywood.
