MAGA Inc. and Those Project 2025 Tapes

Lose a congressional race at 25 and the normal move is a quiet lobbying gig. Leavitt went the other direction: straight into the loudest room in Republican politics.

MAGA Inc.

After November 2022 she became a spokeswoman for MAGA Inc., the primary pro-Trump super PAC. This is attack-dog work — you are the voice defending the candidate in the media while the official campaign keeps its hands clean, and you are expected to hit hard.

She was good at it. Good enough that when Trump built out his 2024 campaign, she got the call.

The Project 2025 videos

Here's the part that generated the most heat, and it's worth getting precise about.

Before joining the 2024 campaign, Leavitt appeared in training videos produced for Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-sponsored initiative to prepare a conservative governing agenda and staff pipeline for a future Republican administration. The videos coached prospective political appointees on handling federal agency bureaucracies and dealing with the press.

Why that mattered: throughout the 2024 campaign, the Trump operation worked hard to distance itself from Project 2025, which had become an effective Democratic attack line. Trump repeatedly said he didn't know who was behind it and disagreed with parts of it. Meanwhile his eventual press secretary was on tape in their training curriculum.

Democrats hammered that contradiction. Her defenders noted, accurately, that appearing in a training video about media strategy is not the same as authoring a 900-page policy document, and that plenty of conservative operatives showed up in Heritage-adjacent projects without endorsing every plank.

Both are true. It's still a genuinely awkward artifact.

January 2024: National Press Secretary

In January 2024 she was named National Press Secretary for Trump's presidential campaign. This is where the public version of Karoline Leavitt got built — the fast, combative cable-hit specialist who treated every interview as a fight she intended to win on the clip.

One of the defining moments of that stretch: a CNN appearance that got cut short after she repeatedly went after the network's own moderators ahead of a presidential debate. The traditional read on that is "she got shut down." The MAGA-world read is "she got the clip and CNN blinked." The clip did numbers. Both readings survived contact with reality.

The strategic insight she actually had

Give her this, because it's the thing that explains everything after: she understood earlier than most that the goal of a television appearance is no longer to persuade the person watching television. It's to generate a 40-second vertical video that travels. Getting cut off is not a loss in that framework. It's the content.

That insight is what she carried into the briefing room in 2025 — and it's why her briefings looked so different from her predecessors'.

Next up: November 15, 2024 — the announcement, the statement, and why Trump picked her.