White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)AP
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt — who has been nicknamed “Bullsh-t Barbie”) is at it again.
On Thursday, Leavitt — who has been caught lying countless times — was nailed again and again and again during a press briefing on Thursday.
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First, she spread a misleading claim about President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.”
Then, she was nabbed lying about a “gravesite” of murdered Afrikaners.
And to top it off, she again insisted “it is absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.”
Where to begin, where to begin.
The House narrowly passed the GOP-led legislation in an early morning vote on Thursday. The president and his allies took a victory lap on the bill’s passage later that day, with Trump calling it “the most significant piece of Legislation that will ever be signed in the History of our Country.”
However, Leavitt repeated a debunked claim about the bill during her press briefing on Thursday.
“The ‘one big, beautiful bill’ also helps get our fiscal house in order by carrying out the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years, with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings,” Leavitt said.
“Every single Democrat in the House of Representatives who voted against all of these common sense and massively popular policies, the Democrat Party has never been more radical and out of touch with the needs of the American people,” she continued.
“The one big, beautiful bill is the final missing piece toward ushering the golden age of America. The Senate should pass this as quickly as possible, and send it to President Trump’s desk for a final signature,” she concluded.
However, deficit hawks and non-partisan analyses have said that the bill will actually only add to the deficit.
According to PolitiFact, Leavitt’s claim of “$1.6 trillion in mandatory savings” only refers to the bill’s spending cuts “without factoring in the lost tax revenue that will increase the annual deficit and the federal government’s cumulative debt.” PolitiFact reported that according to multiple analyses, the bill would add $3 trillion to $4 trillion to the national deficit.
Democrat Isaiah Martin, who is running for Texas’s 8th congressional seat, ripped Leavitt in a post on social media platform X.
“North Korea levels of propaganda,” Martin quipped.
Spencer Hakiman, founder of Tolou Capital Management, also suggested on X that Leavitt “never passed 5th grade arithmetic class.”
U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) was one of the two Republicans to vote against the bill early Thursday morning. Ahead of the vote, he warned the bill would only increase the nation’s deficit by close to $30 trillion of new debt in the next decade.
Leavitt was also asked about another misleading claim made by Trump in a separate question about South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s visit to the Oval Office on Wednesday. During the meeting, Trump showed a video of white crosses that he falsely said were “burial sites” of white farmers who had been killed.
“The president showed a video that he said showed more than 1,000 burial sites of white South Africans that he said were murdered. We know that was not true and that video wasn’t true,” the reporter said, before asking why Trump showed the video if it was not substantiated.
Leavitt fired back, explaining that the video “showed the crosses that represent [white] farmers who have been killed.” The journalist disputed her statement, saying that Trump made an unsubstantiated claim that those crosses were “burial sites” of white South Africans.
Ramaphosa also questioned the video during his meeting with Trump.
“I’d like to know where that is,” he said. “Because this I’ve never seen.”
The New York Times reported that the crosses were not burial sites, but instead were temporarily set up as a memorial event near Newcastle, South Africa.
This is not the first time Leavitt has been caught making false claims during media appearances and press briefings.
She was ridiculed last week after saying it was “frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
But the mocking didn’t stop her on Thursday, when she did it again.
She again scoffed at the notion that Trump is enriching himself, even though he and his family have grown their wealth by an estimated $3 billion (and probably more) since his inauguration. Trump has accepted a $400 million plane from Qatari, closed billions of dollars worth of business deals throughout the Middle East on his recent trip there, has accepted hundreds of millions of dollars in meme coin and social media investments in his companies from inside and outside the United States.
