标签： North America

The impending departure of Karoline Leavitt from her post as White House Press Secretary has triggered a wave of widespread speculation inside and outside Washington over who will step into one of the most high-profile and high-stakes roles in U.S. politics. As of this reporting, no official nomination has been made public by the White House, and anonymous administration sources confirm that no final decision has been locked in, leaving the door open to a wide pool of potential candidates.

Leavitt, a close and trusted advisor who has worked alongside former President and current President Donald Trump for years, leaves behind big shoes to fill. In his public announcement of her upcoming departure at the end of the month, Trump highlighted Leavitt as one of his most trusted aides, underscoring just how difficult the search for a replacement could prove.

Earlier this year, when Leavitt stepped away for a temporary leave, the White House adopted an unusual arrangement where top senior administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, stepped in to deliver press briefings instead of tapping an in-house temporary replacement. Many political observers expect the administration could revert to this ad-hoc system for at least a short transition period after Leavitt exits.

However, the role of White House Press Secretary extends far beyond standing at the briefing room podium to deliver daily statements. A successful press secretary must navigate tense, often contentious relationships with the national press corps, coordinate communication strategy across all branches of the White House, provide trusted media guidance directly to the president, and oversee a small team that manages hundreds of daily press inquiries and information requests. Most critically, whoever takes the role must meet Trump’s exacting personal standards, a challenge that insiders say is far from simple.

“It’s not easy,” an anonymous source close to the administration told the BBC. “That person will be very aware that he’s watching every day.”

Political analysts have already identified a shortlist of prominent potential candidates with deep ties to Trump and the Republican Party, each bringing unique experience to the table.

Leading the list of contenders is Alina Habba, a long-time Trump ally who previously served as his personal lawyer. Last year, Trump tapped Habba to serve as the top federal prosecutor for New Jersey, but her nomination was ultimately blocked by a federal court ruling on her eligibility. She temporarily served in the role in an acting capacity, and in the first months of Trump’s second term, she has held a post as presidential counselor. Trump has repeatedly praised Habba as unwaveringly loyal and a tireless advocate for his policy and political agenda. Habba first joined Trump’s personal legal team in 2021 after meeting Trump at his New Jersey golf club, and she led his legal team during his high-profile 2024 hush-money trial in New York, where Trump was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records; an appeal of that conviction is currently ongoing.

Another top contender is Katie Miller, a 34-year-old conservative media personality and former Trump White House staffer. Miller is married to Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policy. She previously served as press secretary and later communications director for former Vice President Mike Pence during the first Trump administration, and later held the role of communications director for the Department of Government Efficiency—colloquially known as DOGE, the cost-cutting government reform initiative led by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Last year, Miller launched her own podcast targeted at conservative women and working mothers, which has built a sizable audience among Republican voters.

Current White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly is also considered an internal candidate for the promotion. At 29, the former beauty queen has already served as a primary on-the-record representative for the administration to the press, and previously held roles as national press secretary for the Republican National Committee and communications staff for Wisconsin Congressman Derrick Van Orden.

Former ESPN sportscaster Sage Steele has also been named as a potential candidate. Steele, 53, who rose to prominence hosting iconic shows like SportsCenter and First Take, became a vocal campaign surrogate for Trump during the 2024 presidential election and has since emerged as a prominent conservative media figure and consistent supporter of the president’s agenda.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, a long-time Trump advisor, is also viewed as a possible candidate. Cheung built a reputation for his combative approach to press interactions and unflinching defense of the president, first joining Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign before serving as director of rapid response during the first Trump term. He left the White House in 2018 to launch a private consulting firm that supported Trump’s 2020 campaign, and previously led communications for the Ultimate Fighting Championship before joining the Trump team. Shortly after Leavitt’s departure was announced, Cheung posted a public tribute praising his departing colleague, calling her the best teammate, fiercely loyal, unflappable, and an honorable public servant.

Former Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Kenzie McLaughlin is another contender with deep first-term Trump administration experience. McLaughlin became known for her aggressive defense of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies on cable news, and held multiple roles across the Treasury Department and State Department during Trump’s first term. She stepped down from her current role in February and has kept a relatively low profile since, but previously served as communications director for Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and for Vivek Ramaswamy’s 2024 Republican presidential primary campaign, and has worked as a political contributor for ABC News.

Rounding out the list of potential candidates is conservative political commentator Scott Jennings, a senior political contributor at CNN who has become one of the most visible defenders of the Trump administration on mainstream cable news. Once a public critic of Trump, the 48-year-old Jennings has decades of political campaign experience, having worked on four presidential campaigns and three successful re-election campaigns for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, of whom he is considered a close ally. Trump has publicly praised Jennings multiple times for his consistent defense on CNN, noting in a Michigan rally last year that “He’s defending me all the time on CNN, and he defends me really well, but he can’t go too far because if he goes too far, he’ll get fired.” Jennings last year published a pro-Trump book titled *A Revolution of Common Sense: How Donald Trump Stormed Washington and Fought for Western Civilization*.

After months of growing public outcry over documented misuse of its surveillance technology by law enforcement officers across the United States, American surveillance company Flock has introduced sweeping new privacy and security safeguards — a change its founder and chief executive Garrett Langley acknowledges should have been implemented far earlier.

Flock’s network of tens of thousands of license plate reading cameras, fixed surveillance devices and drones have been widely deployed by police departments nationwide. While the tool has proven useful for legitimate law enforcement tasks including recovering stolen vehicles and locating missing people, multiple high-profile cases have exposed dangerous abuse: officers have used Flock’s technology to stalk current and former romantic partners, track innocent civilians unrelated to any criminal investigation, and even monitor a woman who received an abortion. Multiple officers across the country have resigned or been terminated after being caught misusing the platform, and an Indiana man recently confirmed via a public records request that local police had placed an alert on his vehicle despite him never being suspected of any crime.

The scandal has sparked significant public and political pushback: at least 50 US cities have cut ties with Flock so far this year. Still, Langley told the BBC that business remains largely stable, noting that 16 cities that previously ended their contracts have reversed course and resumed their partnership with the firm in the last three months. He added that the company currently maintains a 7:1 ratio of new customers to customers that terminate services.

Looking back, Langley admitted that he was slow to recognize the growing public concern and the need for stronger oversight. Six months ago, during a board meeting, he questioned why Flock was drawing increasing public scrutiny — a moment that came shortly after smart doorbell manufacturer Amazon Ring scrapped a planned partnership with Flock following public outrage over a Super Bowl advertisement that amplified fears of mass unregulated surveillance.

“Historically, my point of view as a chief executive of a private company was, I don’t know if I should be making these decisions. I don’t know if it’s my job to say how long data should be retained,” Langley explained in his interview with the BBC. He has since reversed that position, now aligning with civil liberties groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the core demand that police must be required to link any search of Flock data to an active open case number. “They’re right. I think it should be required,” he said.

Langley acknowledged that employees and community members have repeatedly called on Flock to take a firmer stance as the technology’s creator and industry expert, a responsibility he previously resisted. Now he has embraced that accountability, pairing the rollout of new safeguards with his continued argument that Flock’s tools are critical to reducing crime and improving public safety in American communities. He even claimed that cities that choose not to use Flock’s technology are intentionally making their communities less safe.

Despite this defense of his product, Langley does not deny the widespread abuse that has occurred. He noted that Flock’s prominently placed cameras in neighborhoods across the country have made the company a convenient target for growing public anxiety about mass surveillance and unregulated data collection, a concern that is amplified by the complete lack of comprehensive federal privacy legislation in the US governing how personal data can be collected, used or sold. “Because you can see our cameras, it’s easier to get mad,” he said.

The push for new safeguards grew directly out of community and law enforcement conversations, Langley explained. He recalled meeting a woman in Cleveland who fiercely opposed Flock’s deployment in her neighborhood, telling him she saw the technology as a tool for police to abuse their power. What surprised him, he said, was that many rank-and-file officers shared that concern: during conversations with police, officers often told him they knew some colleagues were misusing access to surveillance tools, but had no formal mechanism to flag or document that behavior.

That feedback led Flock to roll out a voluntary audit feature earlier this year, which automatically logs every search of the company’s database and automatically flags unusual activity that may indicate misuse. The vast majority of police departments enabled the tool as soon as it was available, and the data it captured confirmed just how rampant misuse had become — prompting Langley to make the feature a mandatory standard for all customers.

Langley emphasized that officers who abuse their access to surveillance tools are unfit for service and should face consequences harsher than termination alone. “If anyone is going to be the one that spearheads getting rid of abusive cops? Sign me up,” he said. “We trust these individuals with deadly weapons. I think a camera is very far from a deadly weapon, but I would say it’s a very powerful tool. We should hold it incredibly accountable.”

The key new policy changes also include cutting the default retention period for most user data collected by Flock from 30 days to just seven days, a change designed to reduce the risk of inappropriate access to historical personal location data.

Tucked into the rolling Appalachian foothills of East Tennessee, Kingsport is a working-class community of 58,000 where local lore holds there is a ‘church on every corner.’ Christianity shapes nearly every facet of public life here, with a banner hanging above the city’s historic Lamplight Theatre declaring ‘Jesus first in all things’ as more than 300 local congregations provide spiritual grounding for residents. But alongside these houses of worship, another pillar of the local economy holds equal sway: the Holston Army Ammunition Plant, the only domestic U.S. producer of critical explosive and propellant components for Patriot missiles, warheads, and other heavy military systems, all tied directly to America’s ongoing costly conflict with Iran.

The Iran war, and its cascading impact on consumer prices from gasoline to groceries, has sent President Donald Trump’s national approval ratings plummeting to an all-time low of 32%, a 14-point drop from his 2025 inauguration. Even a share of Republican respondents have cited growing disillusionment with the administration’s foreign and economic policies, as inflation and energy costs squeeze household budgets nationwide. The conflict has pushed U.S. gas prices above $4 per gallon, a punishing increase that ripples through every sector of the economy that relies on transportation. Yet even amid these widespread frustrations, Kingsport remains a bastion of unshakable loyalty to Trump, who carried the city by overwhelming margins in all three of his election campaigns. The broader state of Tennessee has been a solidly Republican red state for more than 25 years, and that partisan loyalty runs deep here.

When it comes to the Iran conflict, the vast majority of Kingsport residents either openly back the U.S. military campaign or justify its necessity, despite Trump’s repeated 2024 campaign promise to end America’s era of endless foreign wars. Pam Robinson, a 65-year-old independent voter and former 20-year veteran of the local chemical industry, frames her support in simple terms: ‘If he can stop anyone from having a nuclear bomb, then I’m for it.’ David Carter, a 66-year-old retired veteran and devout Christian who works as a seasonal Santa Claus, argues that forward deployment prevents conflict from reaching U.S. soil: ‘The whole reason we go over there, and we keep everything under control there, is [so that] we don’t have it on our doorstep.’ Other residents take an even harder line: James Camper, a 63-year-old veteran wearing a branded Trump lanyard, said bluntly exiting a local discount grocery store, ‘Honestly, I think we should turn them into a parking lot and don’t worry about it anymore.’

Veterans make up roughly 10% of the regional population, and many more local households have family members serving on active duty. Robinson, who says her Christian faith guides all her political choices, notes that the remote nature of the conflict has softened local anger: the war has not devolved into large-scale ground combat with massive casualty numbers, a reality that has prevented widespread outrage from boiling over. ‘If it was hand-to-hand and more people were getting killed, people would be banging the doors down,’ she explained.

Kingsport’s unique status as a core U.S. munitions production hub gives residents a perspective on the Iran war that differs sharply from many other parts of the country. The Holston plant employs roughly 1,000 local workers, standing out as one of many large industrial complexes cutting through the region’s lush mountain landscape. Daniel Overstreet, a 53-year-old Kingsport resident, argues the plant will operate regardless of whether the U.S. is at peace or war, and frames Trump as constrained by legislative gridlock. ‘He said he would get the gas prices under control, and they were for a while,’ Overstreet explained. ‘He said he was gonna get food prices down, but he has no control over that. The president is basically a puppet for Congress and the Senate. His hands are tied, to a certain extent.’ That sentiment is widespread across the community: residents do complain about high prices, inflation, and other economic struggles, but very few hold Trump personally responsible for those hardships.

It was Trump who made the final call to launch military strikes against Iran in February 2026, after nuclear negotiations with the Iranian regime collapsed. In an eight-minute social media video announcing the operation, Trump framed the conflict as a matter of national self-defense, saying ‘the objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime’ and pledging that ‘Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.’

William Bogle, a 75-year-old local evangelist who has voted for Trump in every one of his campaigns, acknowledges that the economic strain is real even for his own household: his wife ‘has to stretch a grocery dollar until, you know, it’s big as a bedsheet.’ Even so, Bogle says Trump is ‘doing a good job,’ and that ‘I know he wants the country to prosper.’

This unwavering local support reveals a key undercurrent beneath national polling headlines: while Trump has lost support among traditional Republican and independent voters, his core base of self-identified MAGA adherents remains firmly loyal. As national observers watch to see how Trump’s sliding popularity will impact Republican candidates in the upcoming November midterm elections, this deeply conservative Bible Belt region remains reliably red, with almost no competitive electoral contests. During recent local primary elections, just one Democratic candidate appeared on the county commission ballot, with seven of 11 districts fielding only Republican candidates, many running unopposed.

Many residents say they cannot bring themselves to vote across party lines for moral reasons, with opposition to abortion ranking as the top deciding issue, alongside deep rejection of socialism and so-called ‘woke’ progressive policies. For most voters, these concerns outweigh any criticisms they may have of Trump’s performance in office. David Carter, the 66-year-old veteran and grandfather, concedes that Trump ‘needs to humble himself more,’ but says he will only back candidates who align with the community’s social values, including strict opposition to abortion rights.

Liberal and progressive voices do exist in Kingsport, but they make up a small, largely quiet minority. Adam Teague, a 44-year-old gay piercing artist and lifelong Baptist who is one of the few open Democrats in downtown Kingsport, says he has toned down public displays of his identity since Trump took office to avoid conflict: ‘Before Trump took office, I was wearing, like, rainbow shirts and everything. I kind of toned it down, just to feel safer.’

While Trump won the 2024 presidential election in part by building a broad coalition that included young voters, polling shows growing disillusionment among that demographic, a shift that is starting to appear even in deeply red Kingsport. Mary Herron, a 21-year-old college student who works part-time, said she has seen a quiet shift among her peers: ‘I am seeing a shift in the support … that’s kind of rare around here. But I’ve seen a handful of people who have been like, ‘Oh yeah, well, I voted for him, and now I’m not with him anymore.”

Her friend Emily Villalpando, 21, a biomedical science student who hopes to become a doctor, notes that most young people in the region inherited their political views from their parents, but that as they enter adulthood and take on financial responsibilities, the impact of inflation and economic policy hits much closer to home. Villalpando, Herron, and their friend Caden Bayless, the third member of their progressive college trio, cite women’s reproductive rights and aggressive immigration enforcement as top concerns, but they are skeptical that a major political shift will happen anytime soon in the region. Bayless says she holds out hope that the younger generation can drive change long-term, but ‘given where we live … it would be a very difficult change.’

Bogle, the local evangelist, summed up the region’s political culture in terms that echo that pessimism: ‘We live in a great place, and if you’re not conservative, don’t come here. Because you wouldn’t be a good fit. But if you’re conservative, come here, and we’ll embrace you.’ Like most residents across Kingsport, regardless of their views on specific policies, Bogle says he will continue to pray for Trump, a sentiment shared by even more moderate local voters such as Robinson. ‘All you can do is pray for your leaders, and God will give you what you want in the end,’ Robinson said.

When Karoline Leavitt stepped into the role of White House press secretary in January 2025, she didn’t just take on one of the most high-profile communications jobs in the United States—she etched her name into the history books. At just 27 years old, Leavitt is now the youngest person ever to hold the position, breaking a long-standing record that has stood for decades in American political communications.

The role of White House press secretary carries enormous responsibility, requiring the occupant to serve as the primary bridge between the presidential administration, the White House press corps, and the American public. Every day, the job demands quick thinking, sharp communication skills, and the ability to navigate complex, fast-breaking political stories that shape national discourse. For Leavitt, taking on this role at an age when many young professionals are still establishing their careers in politics marks a significant milestone, and opens a new chapter for representation of younger generations in senior White House leadership.

Since her appointment, Leavitt’s tenure has already been defined by a series of key moments that have drawn national attention to her work at the podium. Her historic appointment itself has sparked conversations about the shifting demographics of American political leadership, and how younger voices are increasingly taking on senior roles in government. Observers and political analysts are closely watching how Leavitt will shape the role of press secretary moving forward, as she brings a new generational perspective to one of the most visible jobs in Washington D.C.

As tensions around U.S. immigration enforcement continue to surge to new heights, a new piece of equipment issued to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents has ignited fierce debate across the country: electrified shock gloves. The BBC’s North America correspondent Sarah Smith has launched an in-depth exploration of this development, digging into what the rollout of the controversial gear means for the agency, its operations, and the ongoing national conversation over immigration policy.

For years, ICE has been at the center of a polarizing national debate, with critics arguing that its enforcement tactics are overly aggressive and violate human rights, while supporters maintain that the agency is simply carrying out necessary work to uphold national immigration laws. The addition of shock gloves to agents’ standard equipment comes at a moment when public friction over immigration enforcement has reached a fever pitch, with protests over detention conditions, deportation policies, and border security continuing to make headlines across the nation.

Shock gloves, which deliver controlled electric shocks to subdue individuals, are classified as less-lethal weapons, but their deployment by ICE has already drawn sharp criticism from immigration advocacy groups, who warn that the new gear could lead to increased instances of excessive force against detainees and undocumented migrants. Smith’s reporting examines both the agency’s justifications for rolling out the equipment – which officials frame as a way to improve agent safety and reduce the need for lethal force in confrontations – and the growing concerns from opponents who argue that the new tools will only escalate violence in already tense enforcement interactions. As the debate over immigration continues to shape national political discourse, this small but controversial change to ICE’s equipment arsenal has become another flashpoint in the larger fight over how the United States manages its immigration system.