White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt found herself in the cross-hairs during a heated briefing after an Associated Press reporter suggested that President Trump’s proposed tariff program amounted to a hidden tax hike. From the first question, it was clear the exchange would be anything but routine.
The journalist asked why the president—who campaigned on broad tax cuts—was now “raising taxes” through tariffs. Leavitt pushed back hard, insisting that the administration’s policy was “absolutely not a tax increase on Americans,” but rather a strategic tax on foreign governments that have “been defrauding us for decades.”
