THE WEST WING ANNEX (FORMERLY THE FOX NEWS GREEN ROOM) (The Daily Whatever Press)—Karoline Leavitt, President Trump’s former press secretary who left the White House in August because Trump dumped her on a decoy plane to spend more time with her family, announced Monday that after eight weeks of deep personal reflection, her family is Fox News.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Karoline home,” I’d like to imagine a Fox News executive gushing, gesturing at a desk where her White House briefing binders had already been installed for reuse. “Honestly, she’s worked here since January 2025. Now we just get to pay her for it.”
Fox announced Monday that Leavitt starts as an on-air contributor on November 1, and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott promised viewers “authentic and sharp insight,” which is a hell of a phrase to hang on a woman whose last job was turning “I’m not going to answer that” into a contact sport.
The timing is chef’s-kiss perfect. Roughly 24 hours before the announcement, her old boss was on Truth Social raging that Fox ignored his Ohio rally, calling whoever makes decisions there a “loser,” and declaring that “MAGA, and REAL Patriots, will never like Fox!” So she’s going to work for the loser. Sounds about right—she certainly has loads of career experience in working for losers.
Her own statement promises, “the unique perspective and candor that defined my tenure with the Trump administration.” Candor. From the press secretary. Somewhere in DC, a White House correspondent laughed so hard that Leavitt, out of pure muscle memory, blurted out, "Next question." Or he's weeping into his notebook of a year and a half of unanswered questions, which is now so waterlogged it legally counts as a wetland and this administration will have it opened for drilling by Friday.
Or both.
Little Karoline’s dream comes true
Here’s the detail buried at the bottom of her bio: in college, Leavitt applied for an internship at Fox News. She didn’t land it. She ended up writing letters in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence instead, and then took the scenic route—through the actual executive branch of the actual United States government—to the job she wanted at 21.
“We apologize for the delay,” reads the form letter Fox HR finally sent this week. “Your application has been accepted. Please report to Outnumbered.”
I made that up. The pipeline didn’t need me to.
The conveyor belt nobody bothers to hide
Dana Perino went from George W. Bush’s podium to a Fox anchor desk. Kayleigh McEnany went from Trump’s podium to Fox in 2021 and now co-hosts Outnumbered and hosts Saturday in America. Sarah Huckabee Sanders went from the podium to a Fox contributor gig to the governor’s mansion in Arkansas. And the belt runs in both directions, because Pete Hegseth went from the Fox & Friends Weekend couch to running the Pentagon, and Sean Duffy went from Fox Business to the Department of Transportation.
It’s the “Hotel California” of employment, except the checkout desk is a makeup chair.
So why is the shitbag-to-broadcaster pipeline so fucking profitable, and so goddamn established that nobody even pretends to be surprised anymore? Follow the money, because it’s sitting right there in an SEC filing. Fox’s cable division, the one that houses Fox News, pulled in $7.35 billion in revenue last fiscal year and $3.10 billion in EBITDA. Distribution revenue went up thanks to contractual price increases, even as subscribers walked out the door.
Translation: the cable company pays Fox per household, the cable company passes that cost to your bill, and you fund the whole operation whether you’ve watched a minute of it or not.
Inside that model, a former press secretary is the perfect hire. Pre-trained. Pre-scripted. Zero onboarding. Fox doesn’t have to teach her the talking points, because she wrote the motherfucking talking points—then delivered them from a taxpayer-funded podium to an audience Fox was already monetizing.
Paddy Chayefsky wrote Network as a warning. Rupert read it as a pitch deck.
Blame the ladder before the climber
Leavitt is 29 and climbing exactly the ladder that was built for her. MAGA Inc., the White House, back to MAGA Inc., now Fox: every rung is a different logo on the same paycheck, and every rung pays better than the one below it. The career path for stonewalling the press has never been clearer, more lucrative, or more openly advertised.
Here’s what that costs. The White House press secretary is paid by us to answer to us. The whole point of the briefing room is that the public gets to ask the most powerful office on earth what the hell it’s doing, and someone has to stand there and respond. When dodging that room becomes the audition for a cable contract, every ambitious 22-year-old in a political internship is watching today and learning exactly what the job is for.
Leavitt starts at Fox on November 1.
Set your DVRs. Or don’t—you’re paying for it either way.
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Surprise, Surprise, Surprise, Karoline is going to Faux news
Why do I hear a donkey braying into the universe??🫏