At 27 years of age, New Hampshire’s Karoline Leavitt made international headlines this week with her first formal briefing in the White House.

The new White House press secretary – the youngest person ever to serve in the role – took aim at traditional media, saying “Americans’ trust in mass media has fallen to a record low,” and welcomed in new media, including podcasters, social-media influencers, and content creators. is the youngest person ever to serve as White House press secretary.

The performance by Leavitt won plenty of praise, as well as an expected dose of criticism from the state Democratic party.

Neil Levesque, the executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, complimented the performance of the St. A’s graduate.

“Not only was she flawless in delivery, she displayed a mastery of the subjects. Most importantly, her overall approach and performance, I believe, matched what the president is looking for as his spokesperson,” Levesque told the Monitor.

The New York Times, a frequent target of President Donald Trump, called Leavitt's performance “steely” but that “her patience seemed to be in short supply at points.”

Leavitt, long a fierce defender of Trump and his policies, grew up in Atkinson, in a Republican-dominated swath of towns in the Granite State’s southern tier along the Massachusetts border. After graduating from Saint Anselm College, the conservative activist headed to the nation’s capital, where she worked in the White House press office during the final years of the first Trump administration.

After Trump’s 2020 election defeat to former President Joe Biden, she served as communications director in the office of Trump ally U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York.

Leavitt then returned to New Hampshire to launch a U.S. House campaign, topping a crowded field of contenders to capture the 2022 GOP nomination in the state’s 1st Congressional District before losing the general election to the Democratic incumbent Rep. Chris Pappas.

After Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign, Leavitt served as top spokesperson at MAGA Inc., the top super PAC supporting the former president. She then moved to the Trump campaign as national press secretary.

Following her first White House briefing, Trump’s top spokesperson got a big thumbs down from longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley, who argued that Leavitt started her new position “to the utter embarrassment of the Granite State.”

“World, don’t blame us for Karoline, we have rejected both Trump and Karoline every time they have been a November ballot,” Buckley said, as he pointed not only to Leavitt’s congressional election defeat but also Trump’s three straight presidential general election losses in New Hampshire, New England’s only swing state.

Shaheen turns up the volume

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen took to the floor of the U.S. Senate this week to condemn an early and controversial move by the Trump’s administration to freeze spending on federal loans and grants.

The memo by the Office of Management and Budget sparked widespread confusion across the country in states and organizations that rely on trillions in federal funding dollars, and quickly triggered legal challenges. It was rescinded by the Trump administration two days later.

Shaheen, the dean of New Hampshire’s all Democrat congressional delegation, took issue with the Trump administration’s argument that the pause was needed to review whether the spending aligned with the president’s flurry of executive orders issued since his inauguration on Jan. 20 that target climate change and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

“This is a decision that does not lower costs, it does not create jobs, it does not enhance public safety or keep our communities safe,” Shaheen argued. “It’s a decision that actually will hurt people in my state of New Hampshire and too many across the country who rely on services that are now in jeopardy.”

Shaheen, a former three-term governor who first won election to the Senate in 2008, emphasized that “common sense calls for all of us to work on a bipartisan basis to help our constituents and put an end to the chaos that has been created by this administration in only its second week.”

A week earlier during a high-profile confirmation hearing, the senator, who sits on the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, targeted now-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for reversing his past opposition to women serving in combat, thanking the former Fox News host and military veteran for his “eleventh-hour conversion.”

Shaheen later joined all Senate Democrats as well as three GOP members in voting against Hegseth’s nomination. Vice President JD Vance was forced to cast the tiebreaking vote to narrowly confirm Hegseth 51-50.

The senator, who turned 78 this week, took over at the start of the new Congress as the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the first woman to hold one of the top two positions on the powerful panel.

And this week Shaheen was named as ranking member of a key appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for much of the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as the Food and Drug Administration.

With the Democrats out of power in the presidency and now in the minority in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, plenty of Democratic lawmakers are becoming more vocal as they have an obvious target in the White House.

“When there’s no one from your party who is seen as the leader, other people have to step forward and speak out on behalf of not just Democrats but American citizens generally with respect to issues that we think are important and are not be addressed sufficiently by the party in control,” former longtime New Hampshire Democratic Party chair and former Democratic National Committee member Kathy Sullivan.

Sullivan insisted that Shaheen is “being vocal on issues that are important, and I think that’s good. We need to be speaking out right now and talking about the mistakes this administration is making.”

Shaheen, who is up for re-election in 2026, has yet to announce if she’ll seek another six-year term in the Senate, but many sources in her political orbit believe she is likely to run, even as she has yet to “make up her mind 100%.”

They add that Shaheen is more than aware that “in this day and age you need to make a decision on a somewhat accelerated timeline.”