Fox News' John Roberts didn't hold back when he confronted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about the Trump administration's decision to grant Vanity Fair nearly a year of unprecedented access for what turned out to be a two-part profile that the White House now calls a "hit piece." The segment highlighted an uncomfortable reality: legacy media outlets will twist access into ammunition. The administration should know better, and there’s an easy way to solve this problem.
"I mean, clearly there was a lot of cooperation between the White House and Vanity Fair on this," Roberts said. "I mean it looks like the White House was working hand in glove with Vanity Fair."
Then he asked the most important question: "What happened? What went wrong?"
The answer came from chief of staff Susie Wiles herself, who publicly denounced the profile as a "disingenuously framed hit piece" that "disregarded significant context" and "paint[ed] an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the president." Leavitt echoed that assessment during the Fox News exchange, calling it "another attempt at fake news by a reporter who was acting disingenuously" and accusing the writer of twisting Wiles' words to fit a predetermined storyline.
According to Leavitt, the real problem was what Vanity Fair chose to leave out. "The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie and our team said about the president and the inner workings of the White House," she said, describing "the bias of omission" as a defining feature of the piece. Leavitt went on to defend Wiles as "the best chief of staff in our nation's history, working for the greatest president in our nation's history," and credited her with bringing "discipline and focus" to an administration that has "accomplished more in 11 months than most presidents do in eight years."
🚨BREAKING: WH Karoline Leavitt on Fox TORCHED Vanity Fair for turning White House access into a "hit piece" on Susie Wiles.
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) December 16, 2025
Omitted positives, twisted context for chaos narrative.
Susie is the "Best Chief of Staff in history"
The FAKE NEWS won't stop MAGA wins. pic.twitter.com/bunCkCd5Bu
That’s all fine and good, but it’s still no excuse. The Trump administration has never had any reason to trust the mainstream media, and Donald Trump's lawsuits against various networks over the past year are proof of that.
Of course, it's easy to see that the White House can’t just give interviews to friendly outlets, as that would invite criticism. But they can ensure that interviews are kept honest — or as honest as possible.
It’s actually easy. I’ve done it myself.
Back in 2017, a senior writer at CNN Digital approached me for a story on Trump. I could tell from the initial email that the article was going to be a hit piece. According to the CNN writer, Trump was a "white racial token" and "white affirmative action president" elected by whites who supposedly lowered their standards out of racial grievance. I had a binary choice: refuse to do the interview, or do my best to counter his thesis. I chose the latter, with a significant caveat.
I agreed to the interview only via email, and it was a good thing I did.
My responses systematically challenged the author’s premise. I pointed out the hypocrisy of the premise by pointing out that Obama was far less qualified than McCain in 2008, and that Trump's win reflected economic and policy dissatisfaction more than race. I also pointed out that Trump improved on Romney's performance with Black and Hispanic voters. Over several questions, I completely dismantled the writer's thesis.
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But only a tiny portion of what I told the writer made it into the article. My empirical challenges to the race narrative were either compressed or omitted. I figured that would happen, and since I had conducted the interview via email, I had a record of the questions and responses, which I promptly published on my website when the article came out.
I think we can all understand why the Trump White House can't shut out the legacy media entirely, but they should know better than to trust them with enhanced interview access without safeguards. We've seen how the media selectively edits interviews to either help Trump's opponents or to create a false impression about Trump. They need to be able to show receipts when they conduct interviews with untrustworthy outlets to help keep those interviews as honest as possible. It’s a no-brainer that the White House should record interviews as well to ensure it can prove that responses were selectively edited.
We know the legacy media won’t be honest, so the White House has to figure out what I figured out years ago and be smarter.
