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Karoline Leavitt steps down as White House press secretary three months before midterms

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s decision to step down from the role comes less than three months before the midterm elections.

President Donald Trump announced yesterday that Leavitt will leave her role at the end of the month to spend more ‌time with her young family.

Leavitt, 28 and the youngest person to hold the role, called it a “bittersweet decision” in a social media post Wednesday shortly after President Donald Trump made the announcement.

She is expected to remain involved as an outside Trump adviser and influential Republican voice.

Trump said he supported the move, though some argue it has come at a pivotal time for the president, with midterm elections due to be held on 3 November 2026.

Historically, the president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections, and Trump’s low approval ratings could pose a challenge for Republicans in November.

Donald Trump’s net approval rating has fallen to -27, a new record low, according to The Economist’s tracker of YouGov polling.

Her departure has also raised questions over who will replace her as White House press secretary and take on the crucial task of communicating the administration’s message in the run-up to the midterm elections.

The administration has not yet announced who will replace Leavitt.

Questions about midterms come as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt steps down from role less than three months before midterms. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

In other developments:

The two most senior members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, secretary of state Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, flew out of last month’s Nato summit in Turkey on what was effectively a decoy plane after an Iranian threat, while Trump was secretly moved to a smaller military jet, a senior US official said Wednesday.

Key events

Troy Jackson, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate seat in Maine, has launched a new campaign ad focused on affordability – one of the key issues driving voters to the polls this midterm election.

Jackson replaced Graham Platner on the ballot after the former nominee faced sexual assault allegations, that he denies. However, he now faces an uphill battle to try to unseat five-term Republican senator Susan Collins.

In the ad, Jackson touts his Maine roots as a fifth-generation logger from Allagash– in the northernmost part of the state. “I grew up as a poor kid, in a town full of poor people doing everything right, but struggling to get ahead,” he says in the new spot. “Susan Collins keeps telling us that everything’s fine, but we know it’s not. We all have eyes, paychecks, and bills. We know we’re getting screwed. You deserve better.”

However, Jackson’s ground game is in need of a financial boost to compete with Collins’ war chest of more than $11m cash on hand, according to her latest disclosures. As of now, Jackson’s campaign reports he has amassed $2m since he won the nomination. That’s on top of the $1m he raised since he formally entered the Senate race in early July.

On Wednesday we reported the news that the Trump administration has finalized a rule to end Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care.

My colleague Melody Schreiber has more on how this stands to impact trans youth.

“This is an incredibly dangerous rule,” said Ma’ayan Anafi, senior counsel for health equity and justice at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). While advocates have prepared for the policy since it was proposed late last year, it is still “incredibly distressing for our community”, they added.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) pointed in a press release to international reviews of the medical evidence such as the Cass Review in the United Kingdom, which has been widely criticized for skewing the evidence, but it did not include the more recent landmark report from the Netherlands finding that gender-affirming care is safe and effective, and should be widely supported.

The new HHS policy is “not about following the science. It’s about promoting this administration’s anti-transgender agenda,” Anafi said. “This stigma is really the primary function of this rule.”

It could also add fuel to the rhetoric increasingly being used in state-level bans and restrictions on care.

Legal challenges to the new rule could delay or block the policy entirely, Anafi said: “A lot of courts have recognized that these actions are based on prejudice and they’re not based on evidence – they’re actually contrary to the evidence.”

If it does take effect, there are other options for providing the care. States could use their portion of Medicaid funds, not reimbursed by the US government, to cover gender-affirming care, and individuals and organizations may also ramp up mutual aid efforts.

“Whenever we see restrictions on care that are based on politics and ideology, we know that patients are ultimately suffering,” Anafi said.

Read the full report here:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spent $464m on 10 used airplanes, but has seldom flown the jets, according to a report by the New York Times.

Citing internal documents and people with knowledge of the no-bid contract, the Times reports that the DHS said it had no time to consider other offers for the plans, and they were needed “urgently” for deportation flights.

In their reporting, the Times notes that three of the aircraft are luxury business jets, which were loaned to two other agencies – including the FBI. While seven other Boeing 737s have been parked in Louisiana, because the department did not have the necessary staff available to operate the planes.

The company that received this contract for the used jets, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, has ties to the Trump administration. Its chairman has donated to a Pac supporting the former homeland security secretary Krisit Noem.

Michael Sainato

The Trump administration has been accused of “bullying and intimidation” after a labor union leader and critic was put under investigation and suspended from his job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Stephen Wheeler, a data scientist at the agency since 2022 and chair of the CFPB union organizing committee, was placed on administrative leave effective immediately earlier this month. The union said it was not provided with any specific violations or given any details of the investigation.

The CFPB – conceived by the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis – has long been a target of Republicans.

When Donald Trumpappointed Russell Vought, architect of the rightwing manifesto Project 2025, to oversee the agency last February, Elon Musk posted, “CFPB RIP,” on X

The labor union representing workers at the agency, the National Treasury Employees Union Chapter 335, noted that Wheeler had been a vocal presence at union pickets, sitting behind Vought during his testimony in Congress in July, and had recently spoken with NPR about the forced relocation of staff at the agency.

Workers have viewed the relocation and return-to-office mandates at the agency as a means to force resignations, after an appeals court blocked attempted mass firings at the agency by the Trump administration in June 2026.

“An investigation with no stated scope or scale is no investigation – it’s a fishing expedition,” Wheeler said. “I have nothing to hide, and when the facts are examined this will be seen for what it is: bullying and intimidation for union activity and protected speech.”

Max Miller’s ex-wife sues him for ‘recklessly’ publishing an image of their daughter as part of custody battle

Emily Moreno, the ex-wife of the embattled congressman Max Miller, has sued her former husband and his lawyer for uploading a picture of their infant daughter to a publicly accessible Dropbox folder as part of their custody battle.

The complaint argues that Miller “recklessly published and disclosed to the world a nude image” of their daughter.

The photos were part of a tranche of evidence that Miller’s team compiled in response to the domestic abuse allegations the lawmaker is facing following his divorce.

The suit says that Miller – who is seeking re-election despite a wave of calls to resign – “so desperately wanted to salvage his political job” that he “recklessly and intentionally” provided his lawyer (Aaron Minc) with “a trove of documents and photos, indifferent about what they contained or how they were used.”

Miller then shared the link to the files online after he went live on social media to refute the allegations against him on 2 August.

Moreno’s lawyers note that “more than 400,000 people saw or interacted with” Miller’s posts containing the Dropbox folder.

The lawsuit – filed in US district court for the Northern district of Ohio – demands the court award $150,000 in damages for “every time someone accessed, transferred, distributed, published, or downloaded the image” of their daughter.

At the time, Minc had accepted sole responsibility for inadvertently releasing the unredacted image of Moreno and Miller’s daughter in the files.

Donald Trump is in Washington today. He’ll spend most of day in private meetings that will be closed to the press. We’ll keep an eye out for any more information on the president’s replacement pick for White House press secretary, following the news that Karoline Leavitt would step down from her role at the end of August.

A federal judge in Miami will hear arguments on Thursday over whether social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate should remain in custody as they fight extradition to the United Kingdom, where the brothers are accused of rape and sex trafficking.

Magistrate Lauren Louis will have a chance to question both sides before determining if the brothers, who have repeatedly denied wrongdoing, should stay in jail or be released during what could be a months long extradition process.

The Tate brothers have remained in a federal detention center in Miami since making a brief court appearance two days after their 18 July arrest. Their attorneys have argued the Tates’ high profile makes it nearly impossible for them to flee and that they regularly post updates about their locations on social media.

According to the US attorney’s office filing, the Tates should be detained pending their extradition hearing because they cannot overcome the strong presumption against bail in international extradition cases.

ICE’s plan to give officers electric shock gloves draws outrage and fears of misuse

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to give officers gloves that deliver painful electric shocks faced criticism Wednesday from Democratic elected officials and civil rights advocates, who called it unnecessary and cruel.

ICE plans to spend between $10m and $20m to outfit officers and agents with “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices,” according to a notice published Monday and revealed first by The Associated Press.

The devices known as the G.L.O.V.E., which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, are normal patrol gloves until an officer presses a button to activate its electrical mode.

They must be applied directly to someone’s skin to produce a voltage that causes pain, which is intended to gain compliance from people who are resisting. Unlike Tasers, they do not leave burn or contact marks.

The size of the purchase suggests ICE plans to give the device to most or all of its officers. The gloves have been used by local departments more often in jails than in the streets, where ICE officers have increasingly used force to extract people from cars and faced protests over their actions carrying out President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, says it Is working to ensure officers “have the tools and equipment necessary to safely arrest and remove criminal illegal aliens.”