
Trump gushes over Karoline Leavitt: ‘It's that face, it's that brain, it's those lips, the way they move!'
The president gave the unorthodox compliments during a Friday interview with Newsmax in response to Leavitt's claim that he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his alleged success since returning to office.
'She's become a star. It's that face. It's that brain. It's those lips, the way they move. They move like she's a machine gun,' Trump said. 'She's a great person, actually. But she's – I don't think anybody has ever had a better press secretary than Karoline. She's been amazing.'
The 27-year-old is Trump's fifth press secretary overall, though remains the only one from his second term so far. At a White House Press briefing Thursday, Leavitt praised Trump in a similarly effusive fashion.
'President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office,' she claimed. 'It's well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.'
Social media was quick to react to the president's comments during his Newsmax sit-down, with some accusing him of being 'creepy.'
'This definitely sounds like something Jeffrey Epstein's best friend would say,' one user wrote, referring to the ongoing furor surrounding the president and his connection to the deceased pedophile financier.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and said that he and Epstein had cut ties many years before allegations of sex-trafficking were made against the financier.
'Will ANYONE in the MSM ask him or the White House about this incredibly bizarre, creepy, cringey comment? Of course not,' wrote one user. 'It's amazing how his 'super Christian-y' base just love that he's such a creepy old pervert,' added another.
A third wrote: 'If any man said this on the job about a fellow employee, they'd be fired instantly, and the company sued.'
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Independent
2 minutes ago
- The Independent
Man charged with killing a top Minnesota House Democrat is expected to plead not guilty
The man charged with killing the top Democrat in the Minnesota House and her husband, and wounding a state senator and his wife, is expected to plead not guilty when he's arraigned in federal court on Thursday, his attorney said. Vance Boelter, 58, of Green Isle, Minnesota, was indicted July 15 on six counts of murder, stalking and firearms violations. The murder charges could carry the federal death penalty, though prosecutors say that decision is several months away. As they announced the indictment, prosecutors released a rambling handwritten letter they say Boelter wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel in which he confessed to the June 14 shootings of Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark. However, the letter doesn't make clear why he targeted the Hortmans or Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, who survived. Boelter's federal defender, Manny Atwal, said at the time that the weighty charges did not come as a surprise, but she has not commented on the substance of the allegations or any defense strategies. The hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dulce Foster will also serve as a case management conference. She plans to issue a revised schedule with deadlines afterward, potentially including a trial date. Prosecutors have moved to designate the proceedings as a 'complex case' so that standard speedy trial requirements won't apply, saying both sides will need plenty of time to review the voluminous evidence. 'The investigation of this case arose out of the largest manhunt in Minnesota's history," they wrote. "Accordingly, the discovery to be produced by the government will include a substantial amount of investigative material and reports from more than a dozen different law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local levels.' They said the evidence will include potentially thousands of hours of video footage, tens of thousands of pages of responses to dozens of grand jury subpoenas, and data from numerous electronic devices seized during the investigation. Boelter's motivations remain murky. Friends have described him as an evangelical Christian with politically conservative views who had been struggling to find work. Authorities said Boelter made long lists of politicians in Minnesota and other states — all or mostly Democrats. In a series of cryptic notes to The New York Times through his jail's electronic messaging service, Boelter suggested his actions were partly rooted in the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor. 'Because I love my neighbors prior to June 14th I conducted a 2 year long undercover investigation,' he wrote. In messages published earlier by the New York Post, Boelter insisted the shootings had nothing to do with his opposition to abortion or his support for President Donald Trump, but he declined to elaborate. 'There is little evidence showing why he turned to political violence and extremism,' the acting U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, told reporters last month. He also reiterated that prosecutors consider Hortman's killing a 'political assassination.' Prosecutors say Boelter was disguised as a police officer and driving a fake squad car early June 14 when he went to the Hoffmans' home in the Minneapolis suburb of Champlin. He shot the senator nine times, and his wife eight times, officials said. Boelter later went to the Hortmans' home in nearby Brooklyn Park and killed both of them, authorities said. Their dog was so gravely injured that he had to be euthanized. Boelter surrendered the next night.


The Independent
2 minutes ago
- The Independent
Harvard scientists say research could be set back years after funding freeze
Harvard University professor Alberto Ascherio's research is literally frozen. Collected from millions of U.S. soldiers over two decades using millions of dollars from taxpayers, the epidemiology and nutrition scientist has blood samples stored in liquid nitrogen freezers within the university's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The samples are key to his award-winning research, which seeks a cure to multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative diseases. But for months, Ascherio has been unable to work with the samples because he lost $7 million in federal research funding, a casualty of Harvard's fight with the Trump administration. 'It's like we have been creating a state-of-the-art telescope to explore the universe, and now we don't have money to launch it,' said Ascherio. 'We built everything and now we are ready to use it to make a new discovery that could impact millions of people in the world and then, 'Poof. You're being cut off.'' Researchers laid off and science shelved The loss of an estimated $2.6 billion in federal funding at Harvard has meant that some of the world's most prominent researchers are laying off young researchers. They are shelving years or even decades of research, into everything from opioid addiction to cancer. And despite Harvard's lawsuits against the administration, and settlement talks between the warring parties, researchers are confronting the fact that some of their work may never resume. The funding cuts are part of a monthslong battle that the Trump administration has waged against some the country's top universities including Columbia, Brown and Northwestern. The administration has taken a particularly aggressive stance against Harvard, freezing funding after the country's oldest university rejected a series of government demands issued by a federal antisemitism task force. The government had demanded sweeping changes at Harvard related to campus protests, academics and admissions — meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment. Research jeopardized, even if court case prevails Harvard responded by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university. In the lawsuit, it laid out reforms it had taken to address antisemitism but also vowed not to 'surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.' 'Make no mistake: Harvard rejects antisemitism and discrimination in all of its forms and is actively making structural reforms to eradicate antisemitism on campus," the university said in its legal complaint. 'But rather than engage with Harvard regarding those ongoing efforts, the Government announced a sweeping freeze of funding for medical, scientific, technological, and other research that has nothing at all to do with antisemitism.' The Trump administration denies the cuts were made in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the demands were sent in April. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel federal contracts for policy reasons. The funding cuts have left Harvard's research community in a state of shock, feeling as if they are being unfairly targeted in a fight has nothing to do with them. Some have been forced to shutter labs or scramble to find non-government funding to replace lost money. In May, Harvard announced that it would put up at least $250 million of its own money to continue research efforts, but university President Alan Garber warned of 'difficult decisions and sacrifices' ahead. Ascherio said the university was able to pull together funding to pay his researchers' salaries until next June. But he's still been left without resources needed to fund critical research tasks, like lab work. Even a year's delay can put his research back five years, he said. Knowledge lost in funding freeze 'It's really devastating,' agreed Rita Hamad, the director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard, who had three multiyear grants totaling $10 million canceled by the Trump administration. The grants funded research into the impact of school segregation on heart health, how pandemic-era policies in over 250 counties affected mental health, and the role of neighborhood factors in dementia. At the School of Public Health, where Hamad is based, 190 grants have been terminated, affecting roughly 130 scientists. 'Just thinking about all the knowledge that's not going to be gained or that is going to be actively lost," Hamad said. She expects significant layoffs on her team if the funding freeze continues for a few more months. "It's all just a mixture of frustration and anger and sadness all the time, every day." John Quackenbush, a professor of computational biology and bioinformatics at the School of Public Health, has spent the past few months enduring cuts on multiple fronts. In April, a multimillion dollar grant was not renewed, jeopardizing a study into the role sex plays in disease. In May, he lost about $1.2 million in federal funding for in the coming year due to the Harvard freeze. Four departmental grants worth $24 million that funded training of doctoral students also were cancelled as part of the fight with the Trump administration, Quackenbush said. 'I'm in a position where I have to really think about, 'Can I revive this research?'' he said. 'Can I restart these programs even if Harvard and the Trump administration reached some kind of settlement? If they do reach a settlement, how quickly can the funding be turned back on? Can it be turned back on?' The researchers all agreed that the funding cuts have little or nothing to do with the university's fight against antisemitism. Some, however, argue changes at Harvard were long overdue and pressure from the Trump administration was necessary. Bertha Madras, a Harvard psychobiologist who lost funding to create a free, parent-focused training to prevent teen opioid overdose and drug use, said she's happy to see the culling of what she called 'politically motivated social science studies.' White House pressure a good thing? Madras said pressure from the White House has catalyzed much-needed reform at the university, where several programs of study have 'really gone off the wall in terms of being shaped by orthodoxy that is not representative of the country as a whole.' But Madras, who served on the President's Commission on Opioids during Trump's first term, said holding scientists' research funding hostage as a bargaining chip doesn't make sense. 'I don't know if reform would have happened without the president of the United States pointing the bony finger at Harvard," she said. 'But sacrificing science is problematic, and it's very worrisome because it is one of the major pillars of strength of the country.' Quackenbush and other Harvard researchers argue the cuts are part of a larger attack on science by the Trump administration that puts the country's reputation as the global research leader at risk. Support for students and post-doctoral fellows has been slashed, visas for foreign scholars threatened, and new guidelines and funding cuts at the NIH will make it much more difficult to get federal funding in the future, they said. It also will be difficult to replace federal funding with money from the private sector. 'We're all sort of moving toward this future in which this 80-year partnership between the government and the universities is going to be jeopardized,' Quackenbush said. 'We're going to face real challenges in continuing to lead the world in scientific excellence.'


The Guardian
3 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Dozens more countries face higher taxes on exports to US as new Trump tariffs come into effect
Dozens of countries face higher taxes on their exports to the US now that Donald Trump's latest wave of country-specific tariffs have come into force. The sweeping 'reciprocal' levies announced by the White House a week ago – just before a previous 1 August deadline was due to elapse – were in place as of a minute past midnight Washington time on Thursday. Just before midnight, Trump claimed on social media that billions of dollars would start flowing into the US as a result of the tariffs. 'The only thing that can stop America's greatness would be a radical left court that wants to see our country fail,' the president wrote in capital letters, referencing an ongoing case in the US court of appeals which is considering whether he exceeded his authority in imposing the 'reciprocal' tariffs. The rates range from 41% on war-torn Syria to 10% for the UK and will be applied on top of the usual tariffs applying to products imported to the US. This means that while Brazil's 'reciprocal' level is 10%, its total rate is 50% after an executive order imposed a 40% additional levy from Wednesday linked to the prosecution of the country's former president Jair Bolsonaro. The EU is the only trading partner where its baseline rate – set at 15% after a framework deal – will include previous tariffs. It means, for example, cheeses that are normally hit with import duties of 14.9% will be taxed at 15% and not 29.9%. Since the announcement late on Thursday last week, governments around the world have been racing to try to reach deals to avert border taxes they fear could deter investors and result in job losses. The Swiss president, Karin Keller-Sutter, was in Washington on Tuesday for two days of meetings with senior Trump administration officials to try to reverse a 39% levy that blindsided the government when it was unveiled. Meanwhile, India's 25% tariff rate could rise to a total of 50% after Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday imposing an additional levy in retaliation for the country's purchase of oil from Russia. Delhi has 21 days to respond. Trump has threatened to use the same tactic on other countries that supply Russia. Sign up to Business Today Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning after newsletter promotion Trump first unveiled the raft of country-specific rates on 2 April, a date he called 'liberation day', claiming the rest of the world had looted the US for decades. After a 90-day pause brought in a week later and another four-week truce announced on 7 July, he confirmed the new set of rates last Friday. Some trading partners secured reductions via negotiations or by striking deals, including the UK, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Pakistan and the EU. Other countries are negotiating tariffs not covered by last week's announcement. Canada has been hit with a total rate of 35% that came in last Friday, while Mexico avoided an increase from its 25% rate on the same date after it was granted a 90-day extension. China faces a 30% rate while negotiations continue before its separate 12 August deadline for higher rates. On Wednesday, Trump also warned that the US would impose a tariff of about 100% on semiconductor chips imported from countries not producing in America or planning to do so.