President Donald Trump has made yet another odd remark about his twentysomething press secretary.
Air Force One hit turbulence on Sunday as it carried Trump, 79, back to Washington, D.C., after his weekly retreat at his Mar-a-Lago bolthole.
As the aging president swayed left to right, ignoring reporters’ questions about the next phase in his plans for Venezuela, he turned towards Leavitt, 28, then back towards the press gaggle.
“I’m looking for something to grab here. Because it’s going to get rough. I think you did this to me, you put me in a position where there’s absolutely nothing to grab,” he said, turning back towards Leavitt. “So I’m looking for something to grab. And it’s not going to be Karoline.”
He turned back to the gaggle, then back towards Leavitt, pawing for a handle again. Reporters ignored the bizarre comment, pressing the president to answer questions on international matters.
At the beginning of the huddle, Trump had warned the assembled press that turbulence would hit. “It’s going to be very rough in about 10 minutes, so we’ll have to go a little bit quickly. They just said, very, very rough,” he warned.
Leavitt is a frequent target of Trump’s lusty gags. Speaking to reporters after leaving Israel following the release of hostages as part of the Middle East ceasefire agreement in October last year, Trump swung from discussing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to land on Leavitt’s facial features.
“How’s Karoline doing? Is she doing good?” Trump asked the reporters.
He then asked the press, “Should Karoline be replaced?”
When one reporter replied, “That’s up to you, sir,” Trump quickly stated, “It’ll never happen. That face… and those lips, they move like a machine gun, right?”
It is not the first time Trump has made the bizarre analogy about his press secretary’s lips and ammunition.
In August, in an interview with Newsmax’s Rob Finnerty, he said almost the same thing.
“She’s become a star,” Trump said of Leavitt. “It’s that face. It’s that brain. It’s those lips, the way they move. They move like she’s a machine gun… She’s a star and she’s great.”
Her lips garnered more attention after White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ unusually candid Vanity Fair interview in December. The two-parter featured an unsettling shot of Leavitt’s face that revealed heavy makeup and apparently enhanced lips.
Revealing why he didn’t edit the image, photographer Christopher Anderson told The Washington Post: “I didn’t put the injection sites on her. People seem to be shocked that I didn’t use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things.”
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