Donald Trump’s gun-loving star Karoline Leavitt – age gap hubby to creepy lips praise

Selling herself as ‘a Generation Z conservative’ for the next generation, Karoline Leavitt had an exponential rise to being the youngest ever White House Press Secretary, but who is she?

The 27-year-old face of Donald Trump’s White House(Image: @karolineleavitt/Instagram)

Determined Karoline Leavitt counts herself as the ultimate Gen Z political pioneer and her position in Donald Trump’s White House certainly shows it.

As the youngest Press Secretary at just 27, Leavitt is a true Donald Trump loyalist and her Instagram proves it. Between pictures of her on beaches, with MAGA signs, wandering around the White House and travelling the world with Trump, there is also some serious gun loving.

A 2022 Instagram video shows her beaming and enthusiastically unloading a machine gun at a firing range with the caption “@joebiden come and take it”.

But who is she and how did she get to be one of the most well known faces of Trump 2025?

She moved straight from student media to the White House press room

Rise to Press Secretary

After she wrote for her school newspaper, she interned at the White House and quickly rose to be assistant press secretary in Trump’s first term.

She tried to make her way to Congress through an unsuccessful race to be the House Representative for New Hampshire in 2022.

Although she lost the race, her star in the MAGA world was rising and Trump came knocking to bring her back to MAGA Inc in the run up to the 2024 election. After he won, she was appointed to the big job for his second term.

Trump assassination decision

Leavitt and Trump are close.

Leavitt is a staunch defender of Trump and MAGA (Image: @karolineleavitt/Instagram)

Despite being pregnant during the 2024 campaign, she worked tirelessly for him and remained unfailingly on message.

Three days after giving birth to her son Nicholas, Trump survived the first assassination attempt. She said: “I looked at my husband and said, ‘Looks like I’m going back to work’. The president literally put his life on the line to win this election. The least I could do is get back to work quickly.”

Recently, Trump, 79, raised eyebrows with remarks about the 27-year-old that many deemed “creepy”.

In an interview, the president said: “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.”

However, the press sec didn’t bat an eye and is steadfastly loyal as ever.

She acknowledges their “a-typical” 32 year age gap(Image: @karolineleavitt/Instagram)

Older husband

Leavitt and her husband Nicholas Riccio met in 2022, when she was 25, and got married in January 2025, just days before Trump’s inauguration.

While Riccio is 59, Leavitt is 27, she acknowledges the 32-year age gap is “atypical”.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly, she said: “I mean it’s a very atypical love story, but he’s incredible. He’s built a very successful business himself so now he’s fully supportive of me building my success in my career.”

They share one child together, Niko, who was born on July 10, 2024.

Traditional media feud

She has a long-running feud with traditional media and has spoken about how she plans to instill some “decorum” in the White House press room, which really means she was bringing in the influencers and podcast bros.

She gave birth to Niko just days before the attempted assasination of Trump(Image: @karolineleavitt/Instagram)

In her briefing room debut, she said: “We know for a fact there have been lies that have been pushed by many legacy media outlets in this country about this president, about his family, and we will not accept that.”

During the 2016 election, at just 19, she wrote an opinion piece for her student newspaper that read: “The liberal media is unjust, unfair and sometimes just plain old false.”

Outrageous claims

Now in the White House, she has really taken on the “mainstream media”.

Back in June this year, she attacked the BBC for taking “the word of Hamas” when reporting on the number of people killed in a shooting near an aid distribution site on Sunday. She also claimed, wrongly, that the BBC had retracted a story. The BBC were quick to slap her down.

She regularly accuses networks, like CNN, of bias against Trump and blocked the Wall Street Journal from a trip after they published an alleged letter from Trump to Epstein.

Leavitt is Trump’s fifth press secretary since he was President in 2016. The longest serving, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was in post from July 2017 to July 2019. But Leavitt looks likely to outlast all her predecessors.