On Tuesday’s installment of the White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the changes owner Jeff Bezos is making at The Washington Post, gave the “new media” seat to Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points, and faced tough questions from across the spectrum on the economy from Fox News, CNN, Politico, and even the Associated Press.

“I would like to commend The Washington Post...According to a new report from Axios, The Washington Post is overhauling their newsroom structure. It appears that the mainstream media, including The Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this President does not help you sell newspapers. It’s not a very good business model,” she stated at the end of her opening monologue.

After Leavitt’s introduction noting Enjeti used to be a White House correspondent and now the host of the wildly successful Breaking Points, Enjeti started with the news of the day, blowing holes in the notion that this “new media” seat is reserved for softball pitchers:

Enjeti followed with two more topical questions, including one pressing from the right (click “expand”):

So, President Trump came out today in a primary challenge against Congressman Thomas Massie. Congressman Massie has been a supporter of DOGE and been a supporter of Make America Healthy Again. What kind of message is this White House sending against a congressman who’s sticking up for principles that he’s long held in the chamber and voting against continuing resolution and spending?

(....)

Just the last question here on Mahmoud Khalil. Does the administration believe that it needs to charge a green card holder with a crime to be eligible for deportation?

Doocy came second and in between a joking question about whether anyone in the administration is shorting the Dow given its rapid drops and President Trump looking at Teslas, he delivered a hardball that, like Enjeti, defeated the idea right-leaning outlets are pure sycophants: “[I]s there any concern here that it’s going to be harder to ask certain federal workers to retire if they look at their retirement accounts and they’re getting rocked every day?”

A reporter towards the back chimed in with a defense of the former Columbia University grad student Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder who was arrested as a leader of the pro-Hamas protests on the school’s campus: “At the core of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses and elsewhere is a demand to end the war in Gaza, a goal that this administration actually supports and has pursued. So why did — why has not — has this not been acknowledged or highlighted even?”

Leavitt promptly dismissed this nonsense because, for example, his group “put out Hamas propaganda, the flyers that have been distributed call for violence” with Hamas’s logo.

“[Hamas is] a designated foreign terrorist organization, and we are not going to tolerate non-citizens, foreigners who come here on a visa, engaging in such behavior, siding with terrorists, and the Secretary of State reserves the authority” to revoke the privilege of being in the United States, she explained.

Fox’s Edward Lawrence also had two questions about the economy, including this one about how to keep up the spirit of Americans who are anxious: “[H]ow do you sell to the American people then after they’re looking at what’s happening in the markets this week and say that the tariff policy long term is something good?”

CNN’s Alayna Treene upped the testiness by peddling the thoroughly debunked lies about the Trump administration cutting entitlements (click “expand”):

TREENE: I wanted to ask you about some comments Elon Musk yesterday — made yesterday. He said that there is $500 to $700 billion in waste and fraud and entitlement spending. He called it, “the big one to eliminate.” Earlier this month, he also referred to Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. Should Americans expect changes, big changes to Social Security and Medicare?

LEAVITT: President Trump has been unequivocally clear on this. He is going to protect Social Security and Medicare benefits and Medicaid for hardworking Americans who paid into these entitlement programs and deserve those hard-earned benefits, and unfortunately, the mainstream media has taken Mr. Musk out of context. I saw a Bloomberg headline that our team actually worked on getting updated and fixed because it was so wrong and it took Mr. Musk out of text what he was specifically referring to cutting was the waste and the fraud and abuse that does exist in these programs. According to an IG report from the Social Security Administration, there’s more than $70 billion of fraud in the Social Security program alone that we know of and so, the President will continue to protect these programs for hardworking Americans and actually cutting the waste, fraud, and abuse out of these programs will protect it for hardworking Americans.

TREENE: But, to be honest, respectfully, he said around $500 to $700 billion. There’s no evidence to claim that. And also, if that is the case, that would represent more than a third of what Social Security paid out last year, maybe 20 percent of Social Security and Medicare combined.

LEAVITT: Well, if you read his full quote, he said, we think. So, it’s an estimate based on what he’s seen. He’s not saying definitively, he’s saying that’s what DOGE suspects and thinks, and that’s exactly why DOGE was created to ensure that we are investigating the fraudulent spending — the wasteful abuse across our federal government, and I would remind everybody in this room that 77 percent of the American people support this effort by Elon Musk in DOGE to identify such waste, fraud, and abuse. 

Despite the AP’s refusal to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and suing Leavitt for keeping the AP out of the White House press pool, Leavitt chose to rise above all that by calling on them. Josh Boak was in the seat on Tuesday and, as an economics guy, he asked about tariffs:

When President Trump last addressed the BRT when he was on the campaign trail, his big push was on tax cuts. He’s going there today as he’s proposing tax hikes in the form of tariffs, and I’m curious why he’s prioritizing that over the tax cuts.

When Leavitt said “[t]ariffs are a tax hike on foreign countries” and “a tax cut for the American people,” Boak clapped back: “I’m sorry, have you ever paid a tariff? Because I have. They don’t get charged on foreign companies. They get charged on the importers.”

Leavitt roared back, calling it “insulting” for Boak “to test my knowledge of economics, and the — the decisions that this President has made. I’m now regret giving a question to the Associated Press.”

Washington Examiner’s Christian Datoc circled back to whether the notion of an External Revenue Service will still come to fruition:

The final hardball on the economy fell to Politico’s Dasha Burns, asking “how high is the pain threshold for President Trump and for this White House as you watch some of the turbulence in the stock markets, as you field concerns from businesses that potentially see some of those approval ratings drop in the short-term, how much is he willing to stomach that and will he stay committed to his vision for tariffs[.]”

Leavitt replied Trump “has been working hard every single day to alleviate the pain that was inflicted by the previous administration through massive deregulation, through drill baby drill as we like to call it, unleashing the might of our energy industry,” and making his tax cuts permanent.

To see the relevant transcript from the March 11 briefing (including questions from our friends Mike Carter of Newsmax, Mary Margaret Olohan with Daily Wire, Lyndsay Keith of Merit Street, and Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese), click here.