White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced on Wednesday that she is leaving her position as the public face of the Trump administration.

The announcement was a bit surprising, not only because Leavitt just returned from maternity leave, but also because of her comments in recent months indicating that women can indeed have it all and raise a family while balancing a high-profile career. Now it seems the addition of another child has changed her perspective.

“Being a mother and welcoming a new baby while working in one of the most demanding jobs in the world has been the most rewarding yet challenging season of my life, to say the least,” Leavitt wrote on X. “The truth is since returning to the White House after the birth of my daughter, I have felt in my heart that I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary….”

Leavitt’s departure is coming at an inopportune time for the Trump administration, for as she acknowledges in her post, “Our country is facing an existential threat from an increasingly extremist Democrat Party that seeks to destroy everything great about America.” As recent primary elections indicate, that threat is the growing popularity of socialist-minded candidates.

Leavitt promises to continue fighting this threat, declaring, “My fight is entering a new phase, but it is far from over.”

Such words are the bread and butter of well-crafted departure posts such as these. But in this case, I think Leavitt’s promise to fight is more than just words. In actuality, quitting the workforce and coming home gives Leavitt a far better path toward fighting socialism than her influential career as press secretary ever could, and G. K. Chesterton tells us why.

“Here are two institutions that have always been fundamental with mankind, the family and the state,” Chesterton writes in “What’s Wrong With the World?”

Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother, and child, and as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery, they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before. While they leave the home in ruins, they destroy the hive, especially the stings.

Leavitt, however, has decided to take the opposite stance. Instead of strengthening the government and continuing to build its machine, she has decided to build up the home, strengthening and renewing her own little family, defining the function of a mother to her little children.

Chesterton goes on to explain why such a move is so important:

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. … Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment (even when freed from modern rules and hours, and exercised more spontaneously by a more protected person) is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. [Emphasis added.]

Put differently, a woman who prioritizes home and children helps the world make sense to her little ones. She answers questions, establishes principles, and instills them with good ol’ common sense – something sorely lacking in those who increasingly push for a socialized mindset in government and in every area of our lives.

Leavitt’s promise to continue fighting may seem cliché, but it’s anything but that. Because the woman who orders well her household, loving her husband and training her children to recognize common sense, produces far more arrows to fight insidious ideology than any time spent at a podium will ever do.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal, a project of 1819 News. 

Image credit: Karoline Leavitt/Instagram