Trump names Karoline Leavitt, 27, as White House press secretary

President-elect Donald Trump announced on Friday that 27-year-old campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt will serve as his White House press secretary.

Leavitt "is smart, tough and has proven to be a highly effective communicator. I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People," Trump said in a statement.

Leavitt will become one of the youngest people to take the key position, acting as the face of the White House and fielding questions from the media.

She acted as national press secretary for Trump during his campaign, giving birth in July to her first child ahead of the election, she told a Fox News podcast posted online on Friday.

After leaving the White House following Trump's election defeat in 2020, she ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the House of Representatives representing New Hampshire during the 2022 midterm elections.

"I didn't grow up in a political family. I grew up like most Americans in a middle-class business family here in my home state of New Hampshire," she told the Fox News podcast. "I just dove into politics at my college, Saint Anselm College, in Manchester (New Hampshire)."

She has also worked as a communications director for Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whom Trump has nominated to be UN ambassador.

Identity politics

Leavitt began her rise through the Republican party ranks after Trump and other contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination visited her university campus in Manchester, New Hampshire, for a primary debate that was broadcast by Fox News.

"As one of the lone conservatives on campus, they appointed me to be an assistant running around that week for Fox News. I was just running around backstage and that's when I decided what I wanted to do with my career," she said on the network's "The Untold Story" podcast.

She went on to pen a column for the student newspaper at Saint Anselm College entitled "Why Donald Trump just keeps on winning and the media doesn't get it," where she opposed the "identity politics" professed by many of her fellow students.

"I didn't believe ... that the colour of your skin or your gender can hold you back in this country. I don't believe that's true. That's the foundation of my conservative beliefs," she told the podcast.

Asked what was different about Trump as he prepares to take office again, she said he was more experienced in politics.

"I think he is more wise about the 'deep state,' the establishment in Washington DC and the lengths to which they were willing to go to derail his campaign and his success," she said.