Karoline Leavitt spent her run at the White House podium trading jabs with reporters, and she says the boss was tuning in for it. In remarks from Fox News personality Sean Hannity’s “Hang Out” podcast that began circulating online Sept. 22, 2026, the former Trump White House press secretary painted President Donald Trump as an encouraging employer who holds women in unusually high regard — a portrait that immediately split the room.
Hannity teed up the conversation by suggesting that press secretaries serving other presidents never had the leeway Leavitt did to take on journalists to their faces, right there in the briefing room. Leavitt’s answer was that the style wasn’t an invention of her own.
“Well, in a way, I’m sort of emulating what he does, right?” she told Hannity, adding that she was simply speaking the president’s language.
A Boss Who Watched the Briefings
Those podium moments, Leavitt said, landed well with her former boss, who appreciated them and tried to catch her briefings whenever he could. She described Trump as a great boss and as “very uplifting to the people who work for him, very complimentary and very fun.”
She went on to say that Trump enjoys watching people do well and likes handing them new opportunities — a management style she framed as the throughline of her own rise from campaign spokeswoman to the most visible speaking role in the building.
The Women She Named
To make the case, Leavitt ticked through the women Trump has elevated across both of his terms: Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff; Kellyanne Conway, who served as senior counsel; and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held the press secretary job Leavitt later occupied. Her point was that the pattern isn’t an accident.
Then came the line that sent the clip around the internet. “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.
Critics Point to the Record
The pushback arrived fast. By Sept. 23, critics on X were circulating the clip with a very different read, pointing to Trump’s long record of attacks on female journalists. They also revived the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump made lewd comments about women — a recording that has trailed him through two presidential terms and remains the first exhibit his detractors reach for whenever the subject of respect comes up.
Jezebel picked up the thread with a piece pressing the same question back at Leavitt, asking readers to square the claim with the record. The exchange became one of those small, self-contained internet storms: a 20-second clip, a few thousand quote-posts, and two camps that heard entirely different things in the same sentence.
None of which is likely to surprise Leavitt, who built her reputation on exactly this sort of friction. The briefing room clashes that made her a fixture on cable news and a lightning rod online were, in her telling, never really a personal flourish. They were borrowed — the cadence, the bluntness, the willingness to name a reporter and go after the question rather than answer it.
What’s notable about the Hannity sit-down is how comfortably Leavitt made that case out loud. Press secretaries typically spend their post-podium interviews smoothing edges and explaining context. Leavitt did the opposite, claiming the edges as the job’s whole point and crediting the man who hired her for handing her the license to use them.
By her account, the sharpest moments of her tenure weren’t hers alone. They were an echo of the president’s own style — and, as she tells it, he was watching.