When White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to social media to post about a recent executive ordered President Donald Trump signed, it (presumably) didn’t go as planned. She shared the link to a fact sheet explaining the executive order, which is focused on researching and approving psychedelic-based therapies to treat serious mental illness. However, based on the way she worded the post, a lot of people thought it sounded like she was saying Trump was seeking treatment for a mental illness.
Leavitt paired the link with a short caption on X.
The caption read, “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump is Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness.” Of course, it’s not hard to figure out what Leavitt was actually referring to, but that didn’t stop people from taking the ambiguous post to mean something else entirely.
“Good! He needs help like NOW!” one person wrote in response to the post. Someone else said, “Glad to see he is finally getting some help, its been needed for a very long time.” But others didn’t really see it as a positive thing, given that Trump is currently president. “Well, he should have undergone those treatments before he ran for office,” another person added.
Journalist Aaron Rupar shared Leavitt’s post and captioned it with, “we’ve noticed and i’m glad he’s getting help.” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s press office, once again, chimed in, writing, “For himself?.”
And Rep. Jack Kimble wrote, “Please pray for our President. He has given so much to this country and it’s been at great personal cost. May the treatments give him the relief he needs.”
She later provided more context.
Lots of people were misinterpreting the original post, whether it was intentional or not. Leavitt re-posted the fact sheet and added more details, writing, “President Trump signed an Executive Order that will accelerate access to treatments for patients with serious mental illness, reaffirming his commitment to advancing solutions that provide hope to Americans with devastating, complex, and treatment-resistant conditions.”
That clarification hasn’t really changed the way people are reacting to the announcement, though. Some critics even questioned whether Leavitt would lose her job over the questionable wording. “I’m betting that the s— wording on this release is going to be the final straw that gets leavitt fired lmao,” one person on X commented.
Several others told Leavitt that she should maybe think before posting things like this.
Trump has joked about firing Leavitt before.
Although he was clearly joking, some critics wondered whether he was actually saying what he really meant and trying to play it off as a joke. Recently, when reflecting on all the “bad publicity” he’s been getting, Trump joked it might be because Leavitt is doing “a terrible job.”
He said, “I got 93% bad publicity, some people say 97, but between 93 and 97. A person that gets 97% of bad … maybe Karoline’s doing a poor job, I don’t know.” Then, he added, “Shall we keep her? I think we’ll keep her.”
Earlier this year, he also suggested that his communications team might to be blame for his low approval rating. “We’ve had the best stock market in history, the best 401Ks in history. And we inherited a mess,” he said at the time. “The numbers that we inherited were way up. And now we brought them, almost all of them, way down. I mean, I’m not getting—maybe I have bad public relations people, but we’re not getting it across.”
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