There are moments in public life when the mask slips so completely that no amount of spin can put it back in place. Karoline Leavitt’s decision to refer to Renee Nicole Good – a woman fatally shot by an ICE agent – as a “lunatic” was one of those moments.
It was not a slip of the tongue. It was not a misquote. It has been repeated, defended, and delivered from the podium of the White House press office – a place meant to speak with authority, restraint, and a minimum level of human decency.
Today she descended even lower:
A woman is dead. A family is grieving. And the official voice of the U.S. presidency chose contempt.
Even if one were to accept every justification offered for the shooting – and the majority do not – there is no moral universe in which demeaning the dead is acceptable. Public officials are not obliged to sanctify those who die at the hands of the state, but they are absolutely obliged to retain their humanity. Leavitt did not.
To describe a deceased civilian as a “deranged lunatic” is not an argument. It is character assassination performed after the fact, when the person in question can no longer speak, defend herself, or even exist. It is a rhetorical tactic designed to do one thing: shift attention away from power and onto the powerless.
This is not strength. It is cowardice.
The language matters. It always has. When a government spokesperson uses dehumanising terms to describe someone killed by law enforcement, it sends a message – not just about the individual, but about the value the state places on accountability. It tells the public that scrutiny is unwelcome, empathy is optional, and force will be justified not by facts, but by framing.
Leavitt’s words also reveal something deeper and more troubling: a political culture increasingly comfortable with cruelty, so long as it is delivered with confidence. Calling someone a “deranged lunatic” is meant to end discussion. It implies irrationality, instability, and unworthiness of concern. It is a shortcut – a way to bypass uncomfortable questions about proportionality, judgment, and responsibility.
And it works only if we let it.
What makes this especially grotesque is the imbalance of power. Renee Good was not speaking from a podium (or on Fox News). She was not armed with authority, legal immunity, or a communications team. She was a private citizen who ended up dead during an enforcement operation. The White House press secretary, by contrast, speaks on behalf of the most powerful office on Earth.
When power mocks the dead, it forfeits its claim to moral seriousness.
This episode fits a broader pattern in American political life: the erosion of restraint, the normalisation of contempt, and the steady replacement of dignity with derision. It is no longer enough for officials to defend policy or justify actions; they must also humiliate, label, and degrade. Someone must always be cast as deserving of what happened to them.
That impulse is dangerous. Democracies do not collapse only through coups or constitutions torn up overnight. They also erode through language – through the quiet acceptance of rhetoric that treats human life as disposable once it becomes inconvenient.
Karoline Leavitt did not merely insult a woman who can no longer respond. She lowered the bar for public discourse at precisely the moment it should have been raised. She chose to inflame rather than explain, to sneer rather than acknowledge loss.
The least a government owes the dead is respect.
The least it owes the living is honesty.
Leavitt delivered neither.
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Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s can’t help but see the chilling similarities in present day US. Karoline Leavitt is a grotesque individual. Is she brainwashed?
so karoline leavitt has medical training also to be able to describe the victim as a derangedlunatic?or is she impersonating a medical professional? can she be charged for that?
Trump’s tasteless tarts and brainless boofheaded beasts. Leaveitt alone. This zoo full of zoology defectives is getting more adolfian every day.
Leavitt obviously believes her own bullshit but as Parkman says in the video, she lies every day. She is the Goebbels of this administration. He committed suicide in 1945, she should retire gracefully before the inevitable reckoning comes for all of those enablers of the most despotic president in US history.
No small irony that this person is in the middle of the biggest circle of’deranged lunatics’,giving comfort to the king of all deranged lunatics.
When it all inevitably goes to shit,they will not be mourned,and may it be soon.This movie is doomed to fail, with so many bad actors.
It’s not like Good can fight back, she’s dead. So it’s no big deal what they say about her. Hideous. And no doubt we’ll hear more of that sort of madness as more people die.
I see that the wretched Leavitt creature has a 60yr old spouse, a 32-year gap on her age of 28. So, she has a daddy complex? She claims Catholic faith, but obviously must have factored in some dispensations that permit her to commit sins of increasing frequency on a daily basis… lying, abusing, demonising; one must assume it won’t end well for the harridan.
Should she, on her retirement, wish to pay a visit to the Land Down Under, it must be obligatory to refuse her application on the grounds of public menace.
Canguro:
The one thing I will say in Leavitt’s defence was that she was groomed from birth to be what she is – a bare-faced liar, a bigot, a white supremacist, christofascist childbride.
It is possible to break away from that sort of conditioning, but it is hard, and rare, and requires considerably more self-awareness and intelligence than she has.
Just a brainwashed wind up doll is leavitt. Being part of a regime she has no idea of its make up or history. Yes they may be many walls waiting for the likes of her to meet their ends.
Utterly disgusting individual – Karoline Leavitt, remember that name!
The new Goebbels… Josephine Karoline Goebbels.
Worse what Trump is forging here is what Putin has done to Russia and what the Ayotollah is doing in Iran right now, and if this doesn’t stop it will be what Netanyahu has already done in Gaza.
Gosh there are no words for this kind of deception and evil.