The West Wing announced Tuesday that the race to succeed Karoline Leavitt will not be a race at all, because racing is a scarcity mindset. Instead, finalists will sit in a circle on the Brady Briefing Room floor for eight weeks and practise co-regulation with the very reporters they will one day refuse to call on. Honestly? This is the most emotionally literate personnel decision the executive branch has made since it started calling firings "boundary-settings."
Each session reportedly opens with candidates naming what the presidency is bringing up for them in their bodies. The podium itself has been placed in a corner to reflect on its role in perpetuating vertical power dynamics, and will be reintroduced only when it can participate non-hierarchically.
"We're not hiring a press secretary. We're hiring someone with the somatic capacity to hold space for the presidential id at 2 a.m., on the record, without dissociating," said a transition facilitator, lighting sage in the Roosevelt Room.
Critics have called the process unserious, and I want to hold space for that. But locating a person willing to stand between this administration and the truth for a federal salary is, clinically speaking, already exposure therapy. The circle merely bills it correctly.








