Fox News announced Monday, Oct. 5, 2026, that Karoline Leavitt, the former Trump White House press secretary, will join the network as an on-air contributor starting Nov. 1.
The announcement came after Leavitt’s description of her former boss drew a wave of argument online. Speaking on Fox News personality Sean Hannity’s “Hang Out” podcast, Leavitt said President Donald Trump is an encouraging employer who holds women in unusually high regard, and that he sometimes may listen to women more than men. The portrait immediately split the room.
Her remarks began circulating online Sept. 22.
“In fact, sometimes I think he might listen to women a little bit more than men and I think that he just has such respect,” Leavitt said on the podcast.
A Style Borrowed From Trump
Hannity set up the topic by suggesting that press secretaries for other presidents never had the leeway Leavitt did to confront journalists to their faces in the briefing room. Leavitt answered that the combative style was not 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 on the podcast.
Leavitt said her podium moments landed well with her former boss, who appreciated them and tried to catch her briefings whenever he could. She called Trump a great boss and described him as “very uplifting to the people who work for him, very complimentary and very fun.”
Leavitt rose from campaign spokeswoman to the most visible speaking role in the building. Her briefing room clashes made her a fixture on cable news and a lightning rod online. In her telling, the style was borrowed from Trump — the cadence, the bluntness, the willingness to name a reporter and go after the question rather than answer it.
Press secretaries typically spend their post-podium interviews smoothing edges. Leavitt instead claimed the edges as the job’s whole point, and she credited the man who hired her for the license to use them. By her account, the sharpest moments of her tenure were an echo of the president’s own style, and he was watching.
The Women She Named
Leavitt said Trump enjoys watching people do well and likes handing them new opportunities. That, in her telling, is the throughline of her own rise from campaign spokeswoman to press secretary.
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. The pattern, Leavitt said, is not an accident.
Critics Point to the Record
By Sept. 23, critics on X were circulating the clip with the opposing read. They pointed to Trump’s long record of attacks on female journalists, and they revived the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump made lewd comments about women. That recording has trailed him through two presidential terms and remains the first exhibit detractors reach for on the subject of respect.
Jezebel published a piece pressing the same question back at Leavitt, asking readers to square her claim with the record.
The argument has stayed a self-contained internet storm: a short clip, a wave of quote-posts, and two camps hearing different things in the same sentence.
She starts at Fox News on Nov. 1.