On Tuesday, Trump turned to his press secretary in front of reporters and told her she was doing a terrible job. He was joking — the White House said so, and Karoline Leavitt was clearly in on it — but the joke still gave away the complaint underneath it. Trump was, once again, talking about the coverage. “I got 93 percent bad publicity,” he said, before turning to Leavitt: “Maybe Karoline’s doing a poor job, I don’t know.” Big laughs. Then the room moved on.
The problem is that the week did not move on. It got worse — and this time the White House did the damage itself.
The Easter Footage the White House Posted — And Then Pulled
The next day, the White House held an Easter lunch in the East Room. It was closed to the press. Then the White House briefly posted the full video online before removing it from public view, with no public explanation. That alone would have drawn attention. What was in the footage made it impossible to shrug off.
Paula White-Cain, Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser and a senior adviser in the White House Faith Office, told him: “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price.” She then compared his political and legal troubles to a “familiar pattern” shown by Jesus — betrayal, arrest, false accusation, then vindication. Trump stood behind her while she said it.
Earlier in the same event, Trump had already supplied his own line. While talking about Palm Sunday, he noted that Jesus entered Jerusalem as crowds honored him as king, then added, “They call me king now.” He turned the joke into a gripe about the court fight over his $400 million White House ballroom project: “I’m such a king, I can’t get a ballroom approved.”
That is the part that matters. The issue was not that critics took a private remark out of context. The White House put the context online for everyone to see, then pulled it back after the clip started moving.
The Backlash Did Not Just Come From the Usual Critics
White-Cain’s comparison drew backlash from Christians, not just anti-Trump regulars. Rev. Benjamin Cremer called it “blasphemy.” Jesuit priest James Martin said praying for a political leader is one thing, but comparing that leader to “the sinless Son of God during Holy Week” is another. That matters because White-Cain is not some random surrogate freelancing for applause. Trump appointed her to an official White House faith role in 2025.
That makes the clip harder to dismiss as one overheated prayer at a campaign rally. It happened at a White House event. It came from someone with an official faith title. And it landed during Holy Week, when even many Christians who usually give Trump room were not eager to play along with this kind of comparison.
This Is Not a One-off. It Is an Optics Habit
This White House talks about hostile media the way some people talk about the weather — constant, unfair, always somebody else’s fault. But it also keeps showing how consumed it is by the image war. In February 2025, the administration took control of the presidential press pool, stripping that role from the White House Correspondents’ Association. This week, People reported that AFP removed a photo of Leavitt after being made aware that the White House found it unflattering, even as AFP insisted there had been no formal request and that the removal was its own editorial call.
That is the thread that ties this week together. Trump can joke about Leavitt doing a terrible job. He can recycle the “93 percent bad publicity” complaint. But the stronger pattern is not media persecution. It is a White House that keeps generating ugly optics, then acting as if the real offense is that people noticed.
The Leavitt line, by itself, was harmless. The Easter footage was not. It showed a president publicly obsessing over coverage, then presiding over a White House event where his adviser likened his suffering to Christ’s and his own riff turned “king” into another complaint about not getting what he wants.
That is why the deletion matters. Sure, it doesn’t prove some grand cover-up, but it matters because it shows the same reflex again — post, regret, pull, say nothing, hope the clip dies. But that reflex is now part of the story too. Trump says the problem is bad press. This week, his White House made the much simpler point. Sometimes the bad press is just the receipt.
