White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took questions from the briefing room for the last time on August 27, 2026, though the 29-year-old is hardly leaving President Donald Trump’s orbit. MAGA Inc., the super PAC she rejoins under the exit she announced August 12, is sitting on a roughly $400 million war chest that has quietly become the engine of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party — a hoard big enough that Washington operatives keep asking why a president who cannot run again needs that much money.
A mother of two, Leavitt said she was leaving to spend more time with her son, Niko, who is two years old, and her four-month-old daughter, Viviana. Their father is her husband, real estate developer Nicholas Riccio, 60. But family is not the whole story: she is also lining herself up to help plan the president’s future.
What she will actually do at the super PAC has not been disclosed. She worked there as a spokeswoman in 2023 before moving to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, yet the operation she is returning to dwarfs and out-earns the one she left. It also sits inside a maze of linked dark-money groups, an arrangement that makes the cash hard to follow.
Reporters got a preview on Friday, August 21, when Leavitt signaled she has no plans to vanish. “You guys will still see me all the time,” she said. The Republican midterm convention, set for September 9 and 10 in Dallas, is expected to find her back at MAGA Inc.; no announcement has been made about her title or duties there.
The $400 Million Question
By February, filings show, MAGA Inc. had pulled in $305 million since Trump’s 2024 victory — about five times what any previous president had collected in the year after winning. The group has barely dipped into the roughly $400 million it amassed heading into the midterms, and Republicans in competitive races are still waiting for the checkbook to open.
The August 25 South Carolina runoff drew one of the PAC’s biggest interventions of the cycle. There the group spent $827,711 on calls and texts backing Trump-endorsed Sen. Darline Graham, who was appointed to the seat of her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, after his death in July. Graham beat Rep. Ralph Norman to take the nomination.
The spending began in earnest on Monday, August 31, with Vice President JD Vance headlining a MAGA Inc. event in Sterling Heights, Mich., for Senate candidate Mike Rogers — one of the first major pushes of the group’s November campaign. Polling released that same day showed 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 set that total against $21 million spent since January 2025.
Industries with billions riding on administration policy dominate the donor roster. At the top is Foris Dax, the parent company of Crypto.com, with about $35 million. Behind it are pipeline billionaire Kelcy Warren, of Texas; billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass; the OpenAI power couple Greg and Anna Brockman; and the crypto twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, whom Trump reportedly describes as “male models with a big, beautiful brain.”
Leavitt’s new colleagues will include James Blair, the group’s current chief, who arrived from the White House, where he was deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs; before that, he served as political director of the 2024 campaign and the RNC. Veteran Trump strategist Chris LaCivita and pollster Tony Fabrizio are there too. Trump built the fundraising machine himself, and he says the money answers to him. Insiders whisper about a different explanation entirely — that the stockpile has little to do with November, and that a Constitution-defying bid for a third term is quietly being prepared by the president, something he continues to raise as a joke.
An Empty Podium and No Replacement
As of Tuesday, the White House had not settled on a successor, and a pick may not come until after the midterms. One reason for the delay was how suddenly she resigned, a White House official told The Independent, with Trump reportedly caught off-guard when she quit. Scott Jennings, 48, CNN’s resident conservative, is the name surfacing most often; described by CNN as the early favorite, he has held quiet meetings with Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, since the job came open. Sources say he is unlikely to be the final pick; parts of the MAGA movement loathe Jennings because he initially faulted Trump for the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Also floated: Trump’s former personal lawyer and failed U.S. attorney pick Alina Habba, 42, who pushed back on rumors she was in line for the job in a post on X; Katie Miller, wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller; the chief of protocol, Monica Crowley, a onetime conservative pundit; Jason Miller, who once spoke for Trump’s campaign; and Leavitt’s deputy, Anna Kelly. Senior administration officials are expected to rotate through the briefing room until a choice is made, the arrangement used during Leavitt’s 11-week maternity leave.
From Intern to Youngest Press Secretary
Her start in Trump’s first term was as an intern in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, and by January 2021 she was an assistant press secretary. In 2022 she won the Republican primary in New Hampshire’s first congressional district, then lost to incumbent Democrat Chris Pappas. Taking the podium at 27 when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025 made her the youngest person ever to serve as White House press secretary, a run defined by combative exchanges with reporters.
Leavitt stepped away from her duties in late April 2026, gave birth to Viviana in early May and came back to the podium for her first formal briefing in mid-July. Trump repeatedly called during her absence to ask when she would return — reportedly one factor behind her decision to leave. She had earlier gone on the Fox News show hosted by Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump to talk about juggling work and motherhood, crediting the president with supporting working parents.
“Karoline has been one of the best White House Press Secretaries in the History of the Office,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that she would remain among his top outside advisers as Republicans fight for the midterms. On a replacement he has stayed publicly silent, apart from sharing an artificial intelligence-generated post casting himself as the best choice for the job.
The president thanked her directly during 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.”
Her exit closes out a year of churn at the top. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have been fired since the start of 2026, while former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement head Todd Lyons resigned amid scrutiny of their leadership. The Iranian Embassy, for its part, pushed a conspiracy theory that she quit over an Air Force One decoy-plane betrayal, though she was unlikely to have been aboard.