Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Aug. 12, 2025
August 12, 2025 · The White House · 0:40:38
Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube
What happened
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt briefed the media at the White House on August 12, 2025, carried on the White House channel. She opened with the President’s Friday travel to Anchorage, Alaska, for a bilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin — “President Trump is determined to try and end this war and stop the killing” — and pointed to the previous Friday’s Armenia–Azerbaijan joint declaration at the White House as the model of the President’s peace-making.
On the economy, Leavitt reported the day’s CPI release as the White House presented it: inflation at a 1.9 percent average annual pace over the President’s first six months, gasoline down nearly 10 percent over the year, eggs down 20 percent since the President took office, shelter inflation at its lowest since October 2021, real wages up 1.3 percent over the year, and small-business optimism at a five-month high. On the capital, she detailed the first night of the D.C. surge ordered the day before: approximately 850 officers and agents across the city, 23 arrests, and six illegal handguns seized, with the administration committed, as she put it, to relentlessly pursue every violent criminal in the District over the coming month. She also reported that illegal border crossings had fallen to all-time lows again on new CBP numbers released that morning.
Why it matters
This briefing is the White House’s day-two account of the D.C. intervention — the first arrest and seizure figures on the record — and its formal preview of the Anchorage summit, tying the week’s diplomacy and the capital operation into one stated agenda.
Scoreboard watch
This briefing is a scoreboard reference point: the first-night D.C. surge figures (approximately 850 officers and agents, 23 arrests, six illegal handguns seized), the CPI characterization, and the record-low border crossings, each as stated by the Press Secretary, to be checked against the published data.
Sources: The White House, “Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt Briefs Members of the Media, Aug. 12, 2025” (official upload, embedded above). All figures and characterizations as stated by the Press Secretary at the briefing.