Goffstown to Rome: The Saint Anselm Years

People love to say Karoline Leavitt "came out of nowhere." She didn't. She came out of Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, New Hampshire — and if you know New Hampshire politics at all, you know that's not nowhere. Saint Anselm's New Hampshire Institute of Politics is one of the most trafficked political venues in the country every four years. Presidential candidates basically live there during primary season.

She attended from 2015 to 2019 on a softball scholarship, majored in communications, and minored in political science. (You'll see her degree described various ways online — communications major, poli-sci minor is the version the record supports.)

She built the thing herself

The detail that actually predicts her career: she founded a broadcasting club at Saint Anselm. Not joined. Founded. She also worked as an associate producer for Hearst Television and wrote for the student paper.

That's the tell. A 20-year-old who looks at a campus with no broadcast operation and decides to start one is a person who is going to be extremely comfortable standing in front of a camera getting yelled at eight years later. The reps started early.

Rome

She studied abroad at John Cabot University in Rome. For a Catholic kid from Atkinson, studying in Rome is not a random line on a résumé — it's a whole thing. It also complicates the flat caricature of her as a provincial culture warrior who's never left the district.

She consistently called on a variety of reporters in the press briefings, often non-legacy reporters standing in the aisles. — Mary Margaret Olohan, Daily Wire White House reporter

The internship that turned into everything

Senior year, she landed an internship in the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence. That's the office that processes the mail — the letters ordinary Americans send the President. It is famously unglamorous. It is also, historically, a real farm system for West Wing communications jobs, because the people who survive it can write fast and handle volume.

She survived it. By 2019-2020 she was a writer and then associate director in that office. By June 2020 she was Assistant White House Press Secretary under Kayleigh McEnany.

She was 22.

Real talk on the timeline

This is the part where fair-minded critics and fans actually converge. Nobody — not The Guardian, not NPR, not the WHCA — has seriously argued she got where she is on connections. The consistent read across the coverage is that she out-worked and out-hustled a lot of people with better pedigrees, and that her loyalty to Trump was early, total, and never wobbled publicly.

The disagreement is entirely about what she did with the job once she had it. Which, conveniently, is the next 17 posts.

Next up: the first White House tour — mailroom to the podium, and a COVID diagnosis after the Rose Garden event.