Karoline Leavitt Goes Off on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins After Gulf of America Question: ‘Let Me Just Set the Record Straight’

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt isn’t getting pushed around.

In just over three weeks since officially taking the dais, she has taken on Democrats in the House, Democrats in the Senate, and the Democrats in the Washington press corps (aka the establishment media).

At a news briefing Wednesday, in a tangle with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, she made it clear that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Collins asked Leavitt to identify the White House official who decided to bar reporters from The Associated Press from an Oval Office event Monday afternoon and from a gathering at the White House Diplomatic Reception Room on Tuesday evening.

As the AP itself reported, the reporters were blocked by the Trump administration because the news service refuses to use the “Gulf of America” to refer to the body of water Trump renamed via executive order on his first day in office.

Leavitt never answered the identity question directly, but made it clear from her answer that she was unapologetic about it.

“First of all, let me just set the record straight. It is a privilege to cover this White House. It is a privilege to be the White House press secretary.

“And nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask a president of the United States questions. That is an invitation that is given … We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office, and you all have credentials to be here, including The Associated Press, who is in this briefing room today.”

The video is below:

.@kaitlancollins asks about @AP reporter being barred from the Oval Office.@PressSec: “Nobody has the right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions…We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office.” pic.twitter.com/U7eR63y52G

— CSPAN (@cspan) February 12, 2025

Collins — clearly looking for a fight — pressed on the topic, asking if the White House move wasn’t some sort of implicit threat to the Trump administration’s commitment to the First Amendment’s guarantee of press freedom.

Leavitt wasn’t backing away.

The new name is the official designation used by the U.S. Department of the Interior, she said, and it has been adopted by the mammoth (and embarrassingly liberal) technology giant Google for U.S.-based users.

“I was very upfront in my briefing on day one,  that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable, and it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is called the Gulf of America, and I am not sure why news outlets don’t want to call it that, but that is what it is,” she said.

“And it’s very important to this administration that we get that right, not just for people here at home, but also for the rest of the world.”

The AP explained its reluctance to adopt the new name in a Jan. 23 announcement. It noted that the news service has a worldwide audience of readers and contributors and said the organzation wanted to avoid confusion.

“The Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen,” the announcement stated.

“As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”

The same announcement by the AP accepted Trump’s re-renaming of the Alaska summit known as “Mount McKinley” after it was re-christened “Denali” in 2015 by then-President Barack Obama.

The mountain is entirely in United States territory, the AP explained, and therefore the president of the United States has the authority to give it an official name.

While the arguments have a fig leaf of logic, there’s no avoiding the political overtones of AP’s decision.

This is the same news organization that, at the height of the racial violence that swept the country after accused counterfeiter George Floyd died in Minneapolis, decided to change its style to uppercase the “b” in “black” in copy that refers to “people in a racial, ethnic or cultural context.”

That decision is not only blatantly political, it defies longstanding rules of English language usage (adjectives are not capitalized unless derived from a proper noun). But the AP seemed untroubled.

In short, when it suited the news organization to alter its style — in blatant, barbaric opposition to basic English — that wasn’t a problem in the service of the progressive cause.

But when it comes to Trump, it’s a different story. Suddenly it’s all about appeals to tradition, and a spurious argument about clarity and confusion.

Does anyone, at AP or anywhere else, seriously think an article about the vast body of water on the United States’ southern belly, the one that laps at Mexico’s eastern edge and western coastal Cuba, is going to be confused with another vast body of water that touches the same countries?

(And if the AP is worried about confusion, for that matter, Trump’s name is actually more descriptively precise. He didn’t say “the Gulf of the United States of America.” He said “America.” The gulf is mostly surrounded by continental North America, not Mexico alone.)

Conservative Americans have had decades of experience with the bias of the American mainstream media. In the decade since Trump declared for the presidency in 2015, that has only become more pronounced — too pronounced for even the most blinkered to deny.

The AP can try to explain away its disdain for Trump’s “Gulf of America” move with appeals to tradition or reference to its global audience, and as a private company, it’s more than free to do so.

Or it can call it the political decision it was and stand by it.

But it can’t expect the Trump administration to blithely ignore the fact that one of the world’s most influential news organizations (the AP style guide is almost universally adopted in the U.S. media) has publicized a decision that is openly antagonistic to the commander in chief.

If there was any question of that on Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt set the record straight.

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