Geraldo Rivera, the 82-year-old former Fox News correspondent and longtime media personality, surprised many observers on March 25, 2026, when he took to X to offer an unsolicited endorsement of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“Karoline Leavitt is a terrific White House press secretary, and spokesperson for the president, measured, controlled, informed, competent,” Rivera posted. “Whether you’re right or left, Republican or Democrat you have to appreciate competence and loyalty.”
The post raised eyebrows — not only because Rivera offered it without any apparent prompt, but because the veteran journalist has spent much of the past year publicly clashing with the Trump administration on several key issues. His sudden praise for one of the administration’s most prominent faces struck many as a sharp about-face.
The endorsement is particularly striking given what Rivera was saying just two months earlier. In January 2026, when new cellphone footage emerged in the fatal Minneapolis ICE shooting of Renee Nicole Good, Rivera came out firmly against the administration’s position. While Leavitt took to social media to declare “President Trump was right again” and called on The New York Times to update its reporting, Rivera posted a sharply worded rebuttal.
“I love cops, but they sometimes **** up,” Rivera wrote on X at the time. “The killing of Renee Good was entirely unnecessary. Two middle-aged ladies, talking smack were not the one with a loaded handgun, and a hair trigger. They did not escalate this deadly confrontation that led to the death of this mother of three young children. This is on ICE.”
The contrast between that January post and his March endorsement of Leavitt could not be more stark. In one breath, Rivera was publicly contradicting the White House line. In another, he was singing the praises of the woman delivering that line every day from the briefing room podium.
Rivera’s complicated relationship with the Trump administration goes back further still. In February 2026, Leavitt herself invoked Rivera’s name at a press briefing — not as an ally, but as an example of someone who had falsely accused the president of racism, citing his description of Trump’s immigration crackdown as “racist government policy.” At that point, Rivera was firmly on Leavitt’s list of critics, not supporters.
What changed? Rivera has not offered an explanation for the pivot. Some observers have pointed to personal parallels between the two. Rivera, now 82, is married to his fifth wife, Erica Levy, who is 31 years his junior. Leavitt, 27, is married to a man 30 years her senior. Whether that commonality played any role in Rivera’s warm feelings is pure speculation, but the internet noticed.
What is not speculation is that Rivera has long occupied an unusual space in American media — a self-described liberal who drifted steadily rightward during his Fox News years, a former Trump friend who occasionally broke with him publicly, and a voice that has become increasingly difficult to categorize. His March 25 post fits that pattern. It was not a full-throated endorsement of the administration, but praise for the person — and in the current media climate, the line between the two can be thin.
Leavitt, for her part, has not publicly responded to Rivera’s endorsement. She has had no shortage of other headlines to manage, including ongoing controversies over the administration’s Iran military campaign, confrontations with the press corps, and a separate social media furor over a White House photo she reportedly sought to have removed from news agency archives.
Rivera’s post garnered significant attention online, with many in media circles questioning his motives. For a man who once prided himself on speaking truth to power, endorsing the administration’s chief spokesperson — without prompting, and without conditions — was a move that left even some of his supporters asking the same question: who asked him?
