Karoline Leavitt gave her final White House briefing this week, and Donald Trump marked the occasion in typical fashion: by taking a black marker to a map and renaming a Great Lake he shares with Canada.
A Marker, a Map, and a Send-Off
Standing in the Oval Office, Trump crossed out "Lake Ontario" on a map and wrote in "Lake America." "Without the 'of,'" he clarified, apparently anticipating comparisons to his earlier renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. He then signed an executive order directing federal agencies to adopt the new name for the 7,300-square-mile lake, though nothing requires Canada, which shares the lake with the United States, to go along with it.
It echoed 2019's "Sharpiegate," when Trump displayed a hurricane forecast map altered to extend a storm's projected path toward Alabama after he'd wrongly claimed the state was at risk. Seven years and one press secretary later, the marker came back out, this time as a farewell gesture rather than a defensive one.
The Press Fights She Leaves Behind
Leavitt's tenure was defined as much by who got into the briefing room as by what was said inside it. After Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America" in 2025, the Associated Press said it would note the change but keep using the internationally recognized name. The White House retaliated by shutting AP reporters out of the Oval Office and Air Force One, and Leavitt announced the administration, not the independent White House Correspondents' Association, would decide who got a seat in the press pool.
A federal judge later found that the retaliation against the AP violated the First Amendment. Leavitt also used her platform to attack transgender people from her first day on the job, part of a broader pattern of tying unrelated administration priorities to anti-trans messaging during her time at the podium.
It's very bittersweet. I'll miss you guys. I know that's probably not something anyone would expect me to say.
Karoline Leavitt
Who She Was Before the Podium
Leavitt, the youngest press secretary in American history, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022, losing to Democratic Representative Chris Pappas. During that campaign she met real estate developer Nicholas Riccio, 32 years her senior; the couple had a son in 2024 and married in January 2025, days before she took the podium. She gave birth to a daughter, Viviana, this past May. Before her White House run, she worked as a press aide during Trump's first term and later as communications director for Representative Elise Stefanik.
Our Read
Leavitt leaves having helped normalize the idea that a press office can pick its own press corps and punish outlets for reporting geography accurately. For LGBTQ+ readers who watched her open her tenure with attacks on trans people and close it applauding a president who edits maps with a Sharpie, the through-line isn't subtle: facts are negotiable when they're inconvenient, whether the subject is a lake or a person's identity. Whoever replaces her inherits a podium where that expectation is now baked in.
Sources: them., The Advocate
Cover photo: White House Office of the Press Secretary, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
