Karoline Leavitt’s advice to successor on last day at White House: Trump is his ‘own best spokesperson’

Karoline Leavitt's parting advice on her way out the door wasn't some grand policy pronouncement. It was almost disarmingly simple: let Trump be Trump. She and Steven Cheung apparently joke that the president is the real communications director in the building, and honestly, who's going to argue with that? The man has been doing his own messaging, unfiltered, for a decade now, and it's worked better than any focus-grouped talking point a staffer could hand him.

There's something refreshing about a press secretary admitting the obvious instead of pretending the podium is where the magic happens. Most political operations spend their energy trying to control their principal, boxing him in with scripts and pivots. Leavitt's take is basically the opposite: your job isn't to manage the boss, it's to get out of his way and let him talk. That's a very different theory of communications than what Washington is used to, and it explains a lot about why the press corps has struggled to predict this White House's moves for years.

It's also a quiet compliment to whoever takes the podium next. Leavitt isn't handing over some elaborate playbook full of jargon and spin cycles. She's handing over a piece of common sense that a lot of professional communicators would rather not admit: sometimes the principal is simply better at this than the people paid to speak for him. For a press shop that's taken plenty of hits from critics who assumed Trump needed constant handling, that's a pretty blunt rebuttal, delivered on the way out the door.