Just weeks after administration officials blamed a staffer for a blatantly racist post that appeared on President Donald Trump’s Truth Social account, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt assured reporters that anything on the president’s bespoke social media site is “straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Leavitt made the startling admission during a press briefing on Wednesday in response to a query about a message Trump had posted moments earlier in which he criticized plans for a U.K. land deal. The president’s afternoon missive was the latest in a series of abrupt and largely inexplicable reversals regarding the British government’s decision to cede control of the Chagos Islands and came just weeks after Trump had walked back previous criticism of the deal by describing the agreement as “the best” the Labour leader could strike.
Asked whether the president’s latest Truth Social missive represented an official shift in American policy against the Chagos deal, Leavitt told reporters that Trump’s post “should be taken as the policy of the Trump administration” because it had come “straight from the horse’s mouth.”
“When you see it on Truth Social, you know it’s directly from President Trump,” she said.
But Leavitt’s defense of the president’s latest social media activity directly contradicts what White House officials were saying just days ago after Trump posted a video to social media that showed Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto apes in a jungle, swaying side to side and smiling as the song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” played in the background.
The video prompted criticism even from some of Trump’s most loyal supporters in Congress, and amid the uproar, a White House official told The Independent that a staff member — not Trump himself — had “erroneously made the post.”
A number of GOP officeholders and prominent supporters of the president publicly called for the unnamed staffer who’d been blamed for the incident to be fired. But thus far, no one at the White House has been ousted over the incident.
Although the White House has an extensive digital communications team that manages the administration’s official social media accounts on X and other platforms, access to Trump’s own Truth Social account is limited to the president himself plus a tight circle of close aides.
Officials did not name the staffer who posted the Obama video to his account.
Trump has long been known to do much of his own posting dating back to his early years on Twitter, when he would opine on just about any subject and wasn’t shy about mixing it up with rank-and-file platform users.
During his early years as a candidate and his first term as president, much of his online activity was managed by Daniel Scavino, a longtime confidant of the president who has worked for him in one capacity or another since he was a teenage golf caddy at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey club.
Scavino, who returned to the White House with Trump last year with the rank of Assistant to the President and Deputy White House Chief of Staff, is understood to still be one of those few aides trusted with access to Trump’s personal social media megaphone.
But with the 50-year-old taking on a broader range of responsibilities in Trump’s second term — including running the White House Personnel Office, The Independent understands that the task of managing the president’s Truth Social output on a day-to-day basis often rests on the shoulders of Natalie Harp, an ex-One America News Network personality who serves as a personal assistant to Trump and works just outside the Oval Office.
The Independent further understands that Harp is often the person to whom Trump dictates the text of Truth Social posts — when he is not posting himself. The scope of her involvement in the Obama post is unknown, however, and she has not been accused of making it. Harp did not respond to a previous email from The Independent.
A former White House and campaign staffer from Trump’s first term told The Independent that the president’s late-night posting-and-reposting sprees were often his own doing.
