Roughly $400 million is waiting for Karoline Leavitt on the other side of the briefing room door. The White House press secretary, 29, took questions from reporters for the last time on August 27, 2026, but she is not walking away from President Donald Trump. Her surprise exit, announced August 12, returns her to MAGA Inc., the super PAC whose money has quietly become the engine of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party — a hoard so large that Washington operatives are asking why a president who cannot run again needs it.
Leavitt, a mother of two, said she was leaving to spend more time with her two-year-old son, Niko, and her daughter, Viviana, four months. Their father is her husband, real estate developer Nicholas Riccio, 60. Family, though, is not the whole story: a role in shaping the president’s future is also within her reach.
What exactly she will do at the super PAC has not been disclosed. She was a spokeswoman there in 2023, before Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign took her on. The operation she is rejoining is far bigger and richer than the one she left, and it routes its money through a tangle of affiliated dark-money groups that makes it hard to trace.
She also made clear she does not intend to disappear from view. “You guys will still see me all the time,” she told reporters on Friday, August 21. Her return to MAGA Inc. is expected in time for the Republican midterm convention, set for September 9 and 10 in Dallas, though her title and duties there have not been announced.
Trump announced the departure on Truth Social on August 12, writing that Leavitt would remain one of his “top outside advisors” and an “influential voice within the Republican Party,” and that she would keep serving his administration as the party works to “conclusively win the Midterm Elections” in November.
The $400 Million Question
By February, filings showed, MAGA Inc. had taken in $305 million since Trump’s 2024 victory — about five times what any previous president had collected in the year after winning. Almost none of the roughly $400 million it amassed heading into the midterms has gone out the door, and Republicans in competitive races are waiting for the checkbook to open.
One of the cycle’s biggest interventions landed in the August 25 South Carolina runoff, where the group put $827,711 into phone calls and text messages for Trump-endorsed Sen. Darline Graham. She is the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham and was appointed to his seat after his death in July, and she beat Rep. Ralph Norman to take the nomination.
Serious spending began August 31, with Vice President JD Vance headlining a MAGA Inc. event in Sterling Heights, Mich., for Senate candidate Mike Rogers — among the first major pushes of the group’s November campaign. Polling released that same day had Rogers trailing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed by four points. The fund stood at $403.5 million at the end of July, according to Federal filings, which also logged $21 million spent since January 2025.
Industries with billions riding on administration policy fill out the donor roster. About $35 million has come from Foris Dax, the parent company of Crypto.com, making it the largest contributor. Behind it are billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass; Texas pipeline billionaire Kelcy Warren; OpenAI power couple Greg and Anna Brockman; and crypto twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. Trump saluted a group of crypto executives at a White House event on August 19 as “my male models who happen to be genius,” adding: “They’re brilliant, and they look good, right?”
Her new colleagues will include veteran Trump strategist Chris LaCivita and pollster Tony Fabrizio. Overseeing the operation from the White House is James Blair, deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs, who was political director of both the 2024 campaign and the RNC. Trump built the fundraising machine himself, and control of the money, he says, rests with him.
An Empty Podium and No Replacement
As of September 1, the White House had not settled on a successor, and a name reportedly may not come until after the midterms. One reason for the delay, a White House official told The Independent, was how suddenly Leavitt resigned, with Trump reportedly caught off-guard when she quit. CNN’s resident conservative, Scott Jennings, is the name surfacing most often, and CNN has described him as the early favorite; since the job opened up he has held quiet meetings with Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff. The final pick, sources say, is unlikely to be him: parts of the MAGA movement loathe Jennings for having initially faulted Trump over the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Also floated are Alina Habba, 42, once Trump’s personal lawyer and a failed U.S. attorney pick, who used a post on X to knock down rumors that the job was headed her way — “Flattered by the Kalshi odds, but I’m not in the running for any job,” she wrote; Katie Miller, married to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; chief of protocol Monica Crowley, formerly a conservative pundit; Jason Miller, a past spokesman for Trump’s campaign; and Leavitt’s own deputy, Anna Kelly. Senior administration officials are expected to rotate through the briefing room until the decision comes, as they did during her 11-week maternity leave. As of August 26, the president had stayed publicly silent on who will replace her, though he shared an AI-generated post declaring that he himself would be “The Best Press Secretary.”
From Intern to Youngest Press Secretary
She started in Trump’s first term as an intern in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, and by January 2021 she was an assistant press secretary. She won the Republican primary for New Hampshire’s first congressional district in 2022 with 34 percent of the vote, but incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas beat her in the general election, 54 percent to 46. When Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, she took the job at 27 — the youngest person ever to serve as White House press secretary. Combative exchanges with reporters became her trademark.
She stepped away from her duties on April 24, 2026, and Viviana was born on May 1. Her first formal briefing back at the podium came in mid-July. Trump called repeatedly during her leave to ask when she would come back — reportedly one factor in her decision to leave. Earlier, on the Fox News show hosted by his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, she had discussed juggling work and motherhood, crediting the president with supporting working parents.
In that same announcement, Trump wrote that “Karoline has been one of the best White House Press Secretaries in the History of the Office.” He thanked her directly again in a White House speech on Monday, August 24, streamed on Fox News. “And our press secretary, mother-of-two, and well, she decided she loved her children more than she loved Donald Trump,” he said. He went on to say he was “very upset” about her departure, adding: “She has to go home and spend time with her children. That does happen on occasion with some people when they love their children.”
The exit caps a year of churn in the administration. Since the start of 2026 the administration has lost former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, while scrutiny of their leadership preceded the resignations of former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Todd Lyons, the acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement head. The Iranian Embassy, meanwhile, pushed a conspiracy theory holding that Leavitt quit over an Air Force One decoy-plane betrayal, though she was unlikely to have been aboard.