Watch: Karoline Leavitt Uses New York Times Reporter's Past Work to Crush Latest 'Fake News' Story on Trump

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is pushing back — hard — after The New York Times attempted to paint President Donald J. Trump as supposedly showing signs of “fatigue” in his second term, a storyline that collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

The Times’ premise was flimsy from the start. Even the article admitted that President Trump’s international travel in his second term has far outpaced the equivalent period during his first. In less than a year, he has already completed multiple high-level diplomatic trips to Europe and the Middle East, along with an intensive swing through Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. Any American who has flown overseas understands what that workload does to a person’s sleep cycle — yet the Times tried to hinge its argument on a moment in late October when the president appeared to briefly nod off during an Oval Office event days after returning from Asia.

For most people, that would be an understandable consequence of jet lag. For the Times, it became an attempted health scare.

Leavitt dismantled the narrative, telling reporters, “The fake news that we see pumped out of this building on a day-to-day basis — it’s honestly overwhelming to keep up with it all, and to constantly have to defend against the fake news and these attacks.”

She noted that the Times “took about one-third of [Trump’s] daily calendar and his daily schedule and said that he’s doing less than he did in his first term, or that he might not be fit for the job,” dismissing the claim as “unequivocally false.”

Then she highlighted the source: reporter Katie Rogers, whose byline appears on a long list of glowing coverage of Joe Biden during his presidency. Leavitt held up Rogers’ past pieces — including “Biden is doing 100% fine after tripping while boarding Air Force One” and 2021’s “Biden declared ‘healthy and vigorous’ after his first presidential physical.”

“Are you kidding me?” Leavitt asked. “You all see him almost every single day. He is the most accessible president in history. He is taking meetings around the clock.”

The Times did cite one data point: that President Trump logged 1,688 official events in the first 10 months of his first term compared to 1,029 in the same span of his second. But even those numbers show a president maintaining an intense pace — logging an average of more than three official events a day — while simultaneously managing a dramatically heavier global diplomatic schedule and a far more complex security environment.

And, as any serious observer of the presidency knows, the first year of a term naturally includes more public-facing events as a new administration establishes its agenda. Over time, the job becomes more strategic, more internal, and more focused on execution rather than ceremony. That’s not “fatigue.” That’s leadership.

Leavitt is right to call this what it is: another manufactured narrative from a legacy media outlet desperate to revive the health-question tropes they once deployed against Trump while shielding Biden from scrutiny at every turn. The Times’ latest attempt to portray a working, highly active president as “slowing down” isn’t just misleading — it’s political messaging disguised as journalism.