Shame on Karoline Leavitt

A mother, a mouthpiece, and the choice to protect a predator

Shame on Karoline Leavitt.

Shame on her as a mother. Shame on her as a woman. Shame on her as a human being—someone who has cradled a child in her arms, who knows the trembling fragility of small bodies, the trust in wide, searching eyes. And yet she wakes up each morning and chooses, deliberately, to lie for a man who has hurt women and girls, who has mocked their pain, who has built his empire on cruelty and dares the world to look away.

She shields him, not out of ignorance, but out of calculation, out of allegiance, out of something colder than indifference. She knows. She knows what hands can do, what words can wound, what silence can destroy. And still, she stands beside him, mouth tight, eyes hard, betraying not just strangers, but every mother, every daughter, every child who ever looked to an adult for safety. The stench of her complicity is suffocating. The sound of her silence is a scream.

Just days ago, she announced that she’s pregnant with her second child. A baby girl.

And ever since I heard that, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

The thought keeps looping, tightening, pressing. How does a woman carry a baby girl into this world—feel her growing, feel her shift under her ribs, imagine her face and her softness and her future—and still wake up every morning prepared to lie for a man like this? How do you hold that contradiction in your body and not break?

I’m not asking this as a pundit or a partisan or someone playing politics from a distance. I’m asking it as a mother, from the place in my body where protection settled and never left. From the instinct that snaps you awake in the dark just to make sure your child is still breathing, that hums quietly under everything you do. Once that instinct takes hold, it rearranges you. It makes lying feel wrong in your bones. It makes pretending impossible. It won’t let you look away, even when looking hurts.

And that’s why I can’t look at her without disgust.

I’ve wanted to be a mom for as long as I can remember, which probably sounds a little strange coming from someone who never had a mother of her own. I didn’t grow up wrapped in reliable tenderness—no steady arms to sink into, no affection I could trust would still be there in the morning. Instead, I learned early how to stay alert, how to read a room, how to sense when the air was about to change before anyone said a word. Comfort wasn’t promised; it was something I quietly learned to live without.

I didn’t know what it felt like to be soothed by a mother, to be softened by her presence, to have safety modeled in a way that let your nervous system finally unclench. What I knew instead was vigilance. Waiting. Anticipating. Making myself smaller so I wouldn’t need too much. And somewhere inside all of that, something else took root.

Even as a kid, long before I could’ve explained any of this, I carried a steady pull toward being the person who stayed, the person who didn’t disappear when things got hard or inconvenient or emotionally messy. I didn’t imagine motherhood as perfection or redemption. I felt it as interruption—as the chance to stop something painful midstream and decide it wouldn’t keep passing through me. I wanted to be the place where need wasn’t dangerous, where mistakes didn’t mean abandonment, where someone could rest without bracing.

I was very fortunate in one real way. I had an amazing father. He loved us fiercely. He showed up. He took exquisite care of us. I’m endlessly grateful for that. But he wasn’t my mother, and there are forms of nurture a father can’t approximate, no matter how devoted he is. There are ways tenderness settles into a child that only come from a mother’s presence—or her absence. That absence lived in me.

Motherhood didn’t soften me. It sharpened me. It honed my understanding of right and wrong until the edges were clean and unmistakable, stripped away the gray areas people retreat to when they don’t want to choose. It made lies louder, excuses thinner, euphemisms intolerable. It trained my attention on what matters at the deepest level. It taught me how narrow the distance is between safety and harm, how often danger arrives polished and persuasive, wearing charm or authority like a disguise, and how much devastation is caused not by monsters in the dark but by ordinary adults who decide that doing nothing is easier.

I have two kids. A son who’s sixteen now, watching everything even when he pretends not to. And a daughter who’s twelve, my youngest, still close enough to that tender edge where trust comes easily, where she assumes adults mean what they say and will do what’s right. Loving them rearranged my entire moral landscape. Certain compromises stopped being possible. Certain excuses stopped making sense.

When I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I cried so hard during the ultrasound that the tech stopped and asked if I was going to be okay. I already knew how to love a child. I already knew how to protect one. What I didn’t know was how to be a mother to a girl, because I’d never known what it felt like to have one. I was terrified and overwhelmed with joy at the same time—scared of failing her at something I’d never been taught, and desperate to learn.

She came into this world with force. The day before my C-section, she flipped herself double-foot down like she already had opinions and no interest in waiting politely. That felt right. I’m raising her to be fierce and empathetic, kind and fearless, honest and human. I’m raising my son to understand that strength without accountability is hollow, that silence is a choice, that looking away doesn’t make you innocent. I’m raising them both to know the difference between what’s easy and what’s right.

And that’s why, when I look at Karoline Leavitt, I feel nothing but revulsion.

She knows. Oh, she knows exactly who Donald Trump is—a man who boasted, with the sick delight of the untouchable, that he could grab women by the vagina at will, because he was a star and that made him a god. She remembers his laughter—sharp, ugly—echoing across the airwaves as he dismissed it all as “locker room talk,” as if sexual assault were harmless banter, as if violation itself were just another joke for men to share, nothing more than a punchline carved into the flesh of women. She knows—don’t you dare doubt it—that this wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was a confession, clear and deliberate, cast into the world without consequence.

She knows that women—brave, battered, trembling—came forward despite the molten cost. She knows what they risked, what it took to face a country hungry to tear them down. She knows a jury listened and heard—yes, heard—and found him liable for sexual abuse. That cannot be erased. She knows that after verdict and verdict, after truth ran bloody in the court, she dared to stand, lips pursed with self-righteousness, and tell the world: Do not believe women. Do not believe survivors. She wielded her voice—her shiny, borrowed authority—to crush the wounded, to shield the predator and keep his secrets safe.

She knows Trump’s name is dragged, again and again, through the filth and shadows beside Jeffrey Epstein—not by accident, not in passing, but day after day, year after year, in the same glittering rooms and on the same private planes with a man who traded children like cattle, who raped the young without pause. She knows—the truth howls in the wind—that credible allegations say Trump raped teenage girls. This isn’t rumor or partisan poison; it is a litany, a record, a procession of women and girls, standing one after another, their pain made public, only to be silenced, spat upon, told to swallow their screaming and disappear.

And still, knowing all of it—knowing the full, stinking scope of his violence, knowing she is carrying a baby girl—she lies. She shields. She lifts the shield to protect a man who destroys women, even as she dares to claim she guards the innocent. She has chosen. She has thrown her lot in with power, with corruption, with the monster himself—and in doing so, she has set flame to the future of every girl she pretends to serve.

Because she knows. She fucking knows. And she does it anyway.

They love to say they protect children. They say it loudly, sanctimoniously. And then they protect predators. They let children starve. They slash aid. They gut funding for pediatric cancer research while bragging about ballrooms and marble and chandeliers. They wrap cruelty in moral language and dare anyone to challenge them. They are not pro-life. That’s a lie.

She won’t disappear—though I suspect this pregnancy will be her soft exit, the cleanest way offstage without ever having to answer for what she’s done. A maternity leave that quietly becomes an escape hatch. A pause that turns into absolution. And then the rebrand will come. She’ll bleach the record, soften the edges, show up somewhere familiar and forgiving—probably on Fox—introduced as reasonable, maternal, patriotic. Just like Kayleigh McEnany. People will eat it up. They always do. They’ll call her devout. They’ll call her wholesome. They’ll pretend none of the damage ever happened.

But she won’t outrun her truth forever.

History is full of women like her.

Women who didn’t just stand near power, but made it palatable. Women who brushed blood off the lapels, who smiled for the cameras, who told the world to calm down, that you were imagining things, that the man in charge wasn’t that bad, that the cruelty had context, that the victims were exaggerating. Women who didn’t pull the trigger but made sure the trigger stayed clean, polished, respectable.

There was Leni Riefenstahl, who wrapped Hitler in light and myth and pageantry and spent the rest of her life pretending she’d only been an artist. There was Jiang Qing, who didn’t just enable Mao’s terror but helped choreograph it. There was Elena Ceaușescu, who ruled alongside her husband while the country starved. There was Imelda Marcos, who smiled in pearls while prisons filled and bodies disappeared.

These women didn’t wield knives. They softened the blade. They gave authoritarianism a human face. They told the world everything was normal while the damage spread quietly, efficiently, permanently.

I hope Karoline Leavitt’s baby girl is healthy. I hope she grows up believed, protected, and safe. I mean that.

But holding that hope doesn’t erase what her mother chose. Because history doesn’t forget women like her.

It records who knew better and chose power anyway. It records who stood guard over predators and called it loyalty. It records the lies, the silences, the moments when saying no would’ve cost something—and who decided instead that the cost belonged to someone else.

One day, her daughter will ask where her mother stood.

And the answer will already be written.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

I’ll have another post tomorrow before the new year!

Stay strong, stay sane-adjacent, and stay safe!

💙 Jo