This may be the most important thing I’ve ever written.
At 1:04 p.m. this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stepped behind the podium in the briefing room, just days after telling reporters that Friday would be her last press conference before stepping away for maternity leave. Yet instead of leaving, she came back. She told the room she felt it was too important not to be there, and then she launched into one of the most dangerous performances our country has ever seen come out of that room.
And within minutes, it became clear this wasn’t a press conference about a shooting as the White House claimed it would be. It was about defining this administration’s next moves. Telling the country that criticism of the president is no longer just disagreement, but something more dangerous and potentially criminal. That the people speaking out against Donald Trump and his regime are not just wrong, but responsible for the violence in our country and subject to consequences for it, saying it in plain language: “This political violence stems from a systemic demonization of him and his supporters by commentators, by elected members of the Democrat Party, and even some in the media.” And then going even further: “Much of the manifesto of the would-be assassin is indistinguishable from the words that we hear daily from so many.”
Karoline Leavitt had already started her maternity leave. She had already said goodbye. And then the shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner gave her, and the entire Trump administration, an opportunity they couldn’t pass up. She postponed her maternity leave and showed up at that podium the next business day, ready to use it.
She opened by invoking the First Amendment. “Saturday was supposed to be a joyful evening celebrating free speech and the First Amendment with all of you, members of the press.” She said it with a straight face. She used the words “free speech” to begin dismantling it. And everything that followed was built on that contradiction.
She told the room that the political violence this country is experiencing “stems from a systemic demonization” of Trump and his supporters. That the “hateful and constant and violent rhetoric directed at President Trump, day after day for eleven years, has helped legitimize this violence.” And then she said the whole framework for the press conference. The whole argument in just a couple sentences before she started to justify all that she was saying: “Those who constantly and falsely label and slander the President as a fascist, as a threat to democracy, and compare him to Hitler to score political points are fueling this kind of violence.”
Notice the word she chose. Slander. That is a legal term. It was not chosen by accident. Slander is actionable. Slander can be prosecuted. She was not just complaining about rhetoric. She was laying the groundwork for a prosecutorial framework. She was telling us, in the careful language of lawyers, that calling this president a fascist, or potentially other labels, may soon have legal consequences. And in the same breath, she said “score political points” to dismiss any pushback and resistance to what Donald Trump is doing as unserious. As a double whammy, or a fallback in case people reject her claim of slander, she leaves them with something else to hold onto: the idea that this isn’t real resistance based on merit, but something being pushed by people who are just trying to score political points for the other side.
And then she went further. She said: “When you read the manifesto of this shooter, ask yourselves: how different is the rhetoric from this almost-assassin than what you read on social media and hear in various forums every single day? The answer, if you’re being honest with yourself, is that there is no difference at all.”
She is not saying the left inspired the shooter. She is saying the left is the shooter. That there is no meaningful difference between a person who writes online that Trump is a fascist and a person who potentially tried to harm him. She is saying we are the same. She used the phrase “if you’re being honest with yourself” specifically to strip the listener of their ability to push back. She was pre-loading her audience with a closed argument. This was a calculated, deliberate, and deeply dangerous statement delivered from the White House podium. And she knew exactly what she was doing.
Because what she is describing, if it becomes policy, if it becomes law, is the end of political dissent in America. If calling the president a fascist is indistinguishable from trying to assassinate him, then calling the president a fascist is an act of violence. And acts of violence have consequences. That’s what she was telling us. That is what this moment is.
She then read a list of names. Democratic elected officials, called out one by one in front of the entire press corps, in front of every camera, and in front of every person watching at home. Hakeem Jeffries. Josh Shapiro. Alex Padilla. Elizabeth Warren. Adam Schiff. Ed Markey. JB Pritzker. Ayanna Pressley. LaMonica McIver. Each name read aloud with a quote attached, each quote stripped of its context, and each one handed to Trump’s super fans, the most radicalized people in this country, as proof that these officials are dangerous.
Trump and his enablers know how his base works. You give them talking points, and they repeat them. You give them propaganda, and they regurgitate it as fact. You call someone an enemy, and they receive death threats. She knows how this works. She has watched it work. And she read the list anyway.
Most recognized the danger in what she was saying almost immediately. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries certainly did, and this afternoon he held a press briefing saying just that.
REPORTER: “Mr. Leader, I know you said you stand by your comments -- at the same time, you have been the subject of threats as well. So with respect to this comment about “maximum warfare,” even if it’s about redistricting, why not tone down the language here in this moment?”
HAKEEM JEFFRIES: “I think what’s interesting to me, as you pointed out, is that the so-called White House press secretary, who’s a disgrace and a stone-cold liar, had the nerve to stand up there and read talking points being critical of statements -- all taken out of context -- that Democrats have made, and didn’t have a word to say about anything that MAGA extremists have said or done, including providing aid and comfort to violent insurrectionists here at this Capitol on January 6th, who brutally beat police officers.
The President then pardoned those violent rioters, many of whom have gone back into communities across the country to reoffend. And as you pointed out, one of whom threatened to kill me. He said, ‘Kill the terrorist.’ Where did that language come from? What Republicans use that language? Why did that pardoned MAGA extremist violent insurrectionist choose to use the language of terrorism directed at me when he threatened to kill me at an event?
So how can we take them seriously when they raise these partisan attacks and completely ignore the fact that a lot of folks -- including Governor Shapiro -- had his home attacked by an arsonist when he and his kids and wife were there?
And this so-called White House press secretary wants to lecture America and lecture us about civility. Get lost. Clean up your own house before you have anything to say to us about the language that we use.”
He told her to “get lost and to clean up your own house.” Because there was not one single word from Leavitt about what Trump has said over the years. Not one reference to January 6th. Not one acknowledgment that the president of the United States spent years calling his opponents enemies of the state, vermin, thugs, and animals. She stood at that podium and delivered a dangerous, one-sided accounting of violence in this country and called it truth.
Last Saturday marked one year of writing these posts every single night. Much of that time has been spent sharing the comparisons between prior authoritarian and fascist regimes and what we are watching unfold today in our own White House. And I want to address something directly tonight, because Leavitt addressed it too. She said that those who compare Trump to Hitler are fueling violence. She used the word “falsely.” And I want to be very clear when I say this: We have every right under the First Amendment to compare what we see happening in this country to what has happened in other countries. That is not a crime. That is history and using our constitutional right to free speech. That is what people who understand the past are supposed to do when they see a pattern forming in the present. This is why we have history books and why we teach and learn about the past. The moment we are in right now demands of us to call it out, name it, and demand accountability.
Karoline does not want us to do this because the path that the Trump administration is taking has been taken before, and they are using it as a playbook today. Not exactly, but similarly in all the ways that matter. One that I keep coming back to is how they keep trying to recreate a Reichstag moment. On February 27, 1933, the German Reichstag building burned. Within hours, Hitler’s government blamed the Communists. The next day, the Reichstag Fire Decree suspended civil liberties across Germany. Within weeks, political opponents were being arrested for using their voices to warn about the actions of the man in power. The fire may or may not have been set by the Nazis themselves. We don’t know who set this figurative fire either, but our current administration jumped at the opportunity to use it to their advantage and turn a potentially tragic event into a tool for them. That is exactly what we watched today.
And it wasn’t just her carefully constructed remarks. The questions she took were just as telling. One reporter asked what the President’s message was to “the millions of Americans who woke up today nervous and uneasy about the safety of the President.” That is not a journalist’s question. That is a script. A real journalist would have followed up on the legal framing of her “slander” language. A real journalist would have asked her to explain what specifically Cole Allen’s manifesto shares with the rhetoric of Democratic officials she named. A real journalist would have asked why she listed Democrats, but not the president himself, who has spent years calling his opponents criminals, enemies, and animals.
Instead, she was asked about phantom issues and the White House ballroom. Because Trump wanted her to work it in, and someone made sure she got the chance. She said the ballroom was “not just a fun project” but a matter of national security, necessary for the line of succession to “gather freely and safely.” That is exactly what we expect a man using an attempted assassination to justify a vanity monument to himself to demand his press secretary to say.
And since she wants to talk about rhetoric that incites violence, we need to look at where the violence is really coming from. The president that she is trying to recast as a victim, is the same president who stood before a crowd on Veterans Day and promised to “root out the Communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical left thugs that live like vermin within our country.” Vermin. A word with a precise and well-documented history in fascist rhetoric. Hitler used dehumanizing language about Jews for thirteen years before he came to power. Mussolini talked about killing rats bringing disease from the east.
This is the same president who said of immigrants, “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” Who said “poisoning the blood of our country” and privately bragged it was “a great line.” Who shared a video of Joe Biden hog-tied in the back of a pickup truck on his social media platform. Who said of Liz Cheney, his own former Republican colleague, “Let’s put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her.” Who told a crowd, “To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much.” Who stood at a podium on January 6th and told thousands of people to “fight like hell,” using the word “fight” twenty times in a single speech, and then watched for hours while they beat police officers with flagpoles and broke through the doors of the Capitol.
And after all of that, he pardoned them. The people who did it. The violent people he sent to the building that held our members of Congress. He called the insurgents hostages. He called January 6th “a day of love.” That is the rhetoric that incited violence. And not one word of it came from a Democrat.
We are entering the most dangerous period of Trump’s presidency so far. We knew this was coming. We knew it would get worse the closer we got to the midterms. And today they showed us exactly what that looks like. They laid the groundwork, in plain language, from the White House podium, to declare our words illegal. To make dissent a crime. To draw a straight line between calling Trump a fascist and pulling a trigger.
So this is our answer. We get louder. If you’ve been on the sidelines, this is the moment to step off them. If you’ve been scared, I understand that fear completely. I know what it costs to speak. I know what comes into your inbox when you do. I’ve lived it for a year. And I’m still here. Because I also know what silence costs. And that price is higher. It always has been.
I made a promise when I started writing these posts. Every time this administration attacked the press, attacked the First Amendment, attacked the right of the American people to speak truth to power, I would call it out by name. Today they took the sharpest aim yet. And I am calling it out. This was an attack on every one of us who has ever typed the word fascist, shared a post, called a representative, or showed up to a protest. They want us to feel it. They want us to hesitate the next time we go to speak. Our answer has to be that we don’t hesitate. We say it louder.
And we put our money where our voices are. Every time this administration attacks the First Amendment, we respond by funding the people defending it. That is the most direct form of resistance available to us right now. Independent media is how the truth stays alive when every other system is being captured. I have written every single night for a year with no corporate backing or sponsorship money. No one who could reach into what I write and change a word of it. Every post I write is free for everyone, because the truth should not be behind a paywall. But that is only possible because of the people who choose to support this work with a paid membership, who understand what is at stake, and who choose to support it.
Tonight I’m asking you to think beyond just my voice. Think about every writer, every journalist, every podcaster, every independent outlet that you turn to when you need the truth and you trust what you’re reading. The ones who are still standing with the truth even when doing so comes at great cost. Because what this administration is trying to build requires our silence. And the most powerful thing we can do right now is make sure the people refusing to be silent can keep going. Every paid subscription to an independent voice is a vote against everything Karoline said at that podium today.
And remember this, too. They are attacking our right to free speech because they are scared. Cornered regimes do not criminalize dissent when they feel secure. They do it when the walls are closing in. The approval numbers are still sliding. The midterms are getting closer every day. They are not coming for our words because they are winning. They are coming for our words because they know what happens when enough of us keep using them. And I, for one, will never stop using my words to fight for our country. And I know I’m not alone. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
PS. You can make a significant difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. Your support helps me cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in this country.
This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the Day: We took a walk along the High Line in New York City today, and I found myself stopping here, just looking up. This is the Vessel at Hudson Yards. Sixteen stories of interconnected staircases, 2,500 steps, built by human hands and human imagination. We are capable of so much. We can build things that make strangers stop and stare. We can create beauty out of steel and ambition. What a waste it is that so much of our energy right now has to go toward fighting people who only know how to destroy. Imagine what we could build if it didn’t.
Sources:
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Apr. 27, 2026: Video
‘Clean Up Your Own House’: Hakeem Jeffries Makes Shocking Remark: Video
https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/27/politics/live-news/correspondents-dinner-shooting-suspect-court
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-correspondents-dinner-suspect-manifesto-details/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5851681-jeffries-leavitt-liar-political-violence-rhetoric/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5851255-democrats-rhetoric-trump-violence-whca-dinner/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-attacks-liz-cheney-war-hawk-guns-trained-on-her-face/
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/03/trump-pennsylvania-rally-media-shooting
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-reichstag-fire
Heather, your work has become absolutely indispensable. I hope you know how much you’re appreciated. Writing every day and giving us this much necessary thought and information with each post is a gift, and you ask nothing more of us than to pay attention and share, which I gladly do.
I will become a paying member when I get into my office tomorrow. ❤️
Thank you for fantastic column