The week after his historic win, the Donald Trump presidency began taking shape with a series of Cabinet and other high-level announcements, and the media, which has chronicled his every troll, tweet, and leak — not to mention substantive policy decisions — for a decade, looked on with trepidation. “Four years ago, everyone was saying, ‘I’m never going to do this again,’” says one veteran political reporter. “Everyone got fat and wrinkles and gray hair and no one saw their kids. Everyone was like, never again, particularly after January 6.”

Yesterday morning, Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett posted what looked like an official announcement from the Trump-Vance transition team announcing Tucker Carlson as White House press secretary. She promptly deleted it; turns out it was fake news. But it wasn’t so hard to believe. Trump a day earlier had picked Pete Hegseth, the square-jawed Fox News host and self-certified anti-woke crusader, to run the Pentagon.

In fact, Trump has yet to name a press secretary, the most public-facing role in the shop. The press secretary typically holds a daily briefing with the White House press corps, though that practice became not so daily in Trump’s first term, when his press secretaries went weeks and then months without taking questions from reporters. (It came back on a regular basis under President Biden, even if the big guy himself was a bit averse to meeting the press.) Trump in his first administration went through four press secretaries: Sean Spicer (now a podcaster), Sarah Huckabee Sanders (now the governor of Arkansas), Stephanie Grisham (now a frequent anti-Trump voice on TV panels and beyond — she spoke at the DNC), and Kayleigh McEnany (now a Fox News co-host).

“In the previous four years, he often benefited from press secretaries who had a good working relationship with the press and knew how to manage a story,” one reporter on the Trump beat said, noting his coverage “was probably slightly better” when Sanders was behind the podium, even though she acknowledged misleading the press and broke and rebroke the record for not briefing them throughout her nearly two years in the job (until Grisham, who in her six months in the job held zero briefings). But behind the scenes, the reporter noted, Sanders could be helpful.

Several reporters think Karoline Leavitt, who served as the campaign’s national press secretary and now serves as transition spokeswoman, is the current front-runner. The 27-year-old, who served as an assistant press secretary and presidential writer during the first Trump administration, was described as sharp, aggressive, and — as is important to Trump — telegenic, sparring with CNN and, more recently, previewing Trump’s day one on Fox News. Leavitt has “gone on the ‘adversarial’ networks and done pretty well, and he loves........

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