It was near the end of her press briefing last Thursday that White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called on The Hill's Niall Stanage.
Stanage began with a statement: “Renee Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent.”
“Why was Rene Good unfortunately and tragically killed?” Leavitt responded.
Stanage: “Are you asking me my opinion?”
Leavitt: “Yes.”
“Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed an unjustified person,” Stanage said.
Leavitt had clearly been waiting for this inevitable opinion from one of the press corps, and she unloaded.
“You're a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion. You’re a left-wing hack. You're not a reporter. You're posing in this room as a journalist.”
She was starting to sound like the first-term Donald Trump.
“You and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you're a journalist, you shouldn't even be sitting in that seat.”
Then she turned the tables on Stanage and asked him a question.
“Do you have the numbers of how many American citizens were killed at the hands of illegal aliens who ICE is trying to remove from this country? I bet you don't.”
Then before moving on to the next reporter, she set the record straight.
“The brave men and women of ICE are doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our communities safer.”
In his second term, President Donald Trump has leaned leaning more to his own and allied digital platforms like Truth Social and other social channels to bypass mainstream media filters and speak directly to Americans. It’s an approach that’s allowed him to become less dependent on traditional media outlets.
While the adversarial relationship continues, fewer Americans report hearing “a lot” about it, perhaps because the dynamic has become more normalized or because coverage has shifted focus to new policy battles.
