Just after one o’clock on Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pulled back the sliding door from the nest of West Wing offices and made a last fleeting appearance at the podium of the James Brady briefing room. She was there for a quick family photograph for posterity, accompanied by her husband and children. The briefing room was lunchtime-sleepy and almost deserted. Leavitt did not speak, other than to offer those present a cheery thank you. It was a remarkably low-key conclusion to her extraordinarily high-profile and often abrasive role within the Trump administration. Elsewhere within the building, events continued at their customary breakneck speed even as Leavitt cleared her desk. Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick was adamant that the scuttling of a trade deal that last week seemed complete was all on the US’s northern neighbours, blaming Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney for the breakdown. By then, Trump had already signed his executive order to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. Although Carney came back with a withering reply, it was noticeable that unlike Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico in the early days of his administration, repeating the trick didn’t cause as much of a ripple: if the great lake itself could have shrugged, it would. In the midafternoon, the president would fly south, to Texas, for a fundraiser event where, he promised, he would campaign on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton against the insurgent Democratic pastor and progressive James Talarico, whom the president referred to as “James Tala-freako.”“Because he is a little freaky and he’s not a man who represents the values of Texas,” he explained. Leavitt was leaving, but the chaos was still at a hundred miles an hour.Since her appointment as the youngest press secretary in the history of the White House in 2025, Leavitt established herself as a fiery and unflappable defender of Trump’s remarks and policies on the podium. She quickly became one of the more high-profile Maga figures within the administration and provoked predictably strong opinion along partisan lines; revered by the Maga movement for her trenchant dressing down of the legacy media and loathed by the left for doubling down on all of Trump’s positions, however outrageous they seemed. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt (second from left) takes a group photo with her team on her last day in the press briefing room of the White House. Photograph: Demetrius Freeman/The New York Times