If you took Karoline Leavitt’s words at face value, you’d be a deeply confused, extremely alarmed person. For one thing, you’d believe that “literal self-proclaimed communists” are “winning elections” and “claiming to be the new leadership” of the Democratic Party. This fact, the White House press secretary told the room gravely on Thursday, could end up making America look very much like the “failed state” of Cuba.

It’s not exactly unusual for Republicans to call Democrats communists, but it is interesting how the words “literal” and “self-proclaimed” have now lost all their meaning in MAGAland.

It’s interesting, too, that the left-of-center Democrats who have recently won elections — such as Zohran Mamdani in New York — did so after campaigning on affordability, a word that both Trump and Leavitt have an ongoing issue with. Trump, nonsensically, has said before that “affordability is a Democrat scam” and a “hoax,” and Leavitt today echoed that when she attacked the “Democrat solution to, quote, affordability”.

But if you keep saying “affordability” like it isn’t a real word or a real issue, it doesn’t stop people noticing when their groceries aren’t affordable. Skyrocketing prices of fertilizer that then impacted food prices across the country happened because of Trump’s war in Iran. Skyrocketing prices of oil that then impacted gas prices across the country happened because of Trump’s war in Iran.

No amount of claims about “the economy” being fantastic or Trump “setting up workers to thrive like never before” will make Americans stop believing the numbers on their credit cards.

This was a short White House press briefing, but it was telling. When asked about the nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, Leavitt first read out a Truth Social post made by Trump the night before (a bizarre choice in itself.) She then suggested that the reason Saudi Arabia gets a civilian nuclear deal and Iran doesn’t is because the Saudi deal gives “priority access to American companies” and “puts America first.” It’s extremely ‘we went to war for their oil’-adjacent reasoning, and it’s the type of thing even the world’s least scrupulous leaders tend not to say in public.

The administration limps on in Iran, repeatedly justifying death and destruction by saying that “Iran must never have a nuclear weapon”. Trump has even recently stated, without evidence, that the 17 American service members who have died in the conflict so far personally told him that that’s a belief they each individually held dear.

And yet, here we are, signing sudden deals with another country in the region that allow, according to some insiders, for Saudi to escalate its nuclear ambitions with no international oversight. It’s an incredibly risky thing to do from a geopolitical perspective. The justification — that it will make American corporations money and that’s why the country isn’t being bombed into oblivion like Iran — should be genuinely shocking.

Perhaps it would be, if the zone weren’t being flooded with claims about literal self-proclaimed communists and voter scams. Leavitt’s answer about New Jersey, where it was recently found that 6600 non-citizens had been erroneously added to voter rolls and then identified and removed, was effectively that there’s a conspiracy afoot, that the New Jersey governor can’t be trusted, and that the president has a feeling about all that so it’s probably true.

“All of a sudden this governor put out a press release saying President Trump was right… it’s not a coincidence,” Leavitt said, her voice rising.

“She says it’s 6600, we suspect it’s a heck of a lot more,” she continued, adding that “the president is hellbent on getting to the bottom of this.”

The president is sanctioning nuclear expansion in Saudi Arabia and you can read about it on Truth Social if you want to know the details. The president thinks the election won’t be fair while his approval ratings are dropping. The president will not allow communism to rein in America. The president says the economy is doing great, and that the word ‘affordability’ doesn’t exist. The president got loud applause in Georgia this week, which proves he’s actually more popular than the lamestream media would have you believe.

Karoline Leavitt is much more cogent than the president, but she still accurately communicates the chaos of his mindset. So yes, if you took her words at face value, you’d be a deeply confused, extremely alarmed person. In other words, you’d be exactly where MAGA would prefer you to be.