Karoline refused to ever be late. It was something she’d learned at Saint Anselm College, a small Catholic school in New Hampshire. While other students would often hang out at the Joan of Arc Quad, she was either playing softball or studying.
She’d always wanted to go to Saint Anselm. After all, no one runs for president without speaking at St. A’s Institute of Politics. It was the single-most popular location in New Hampshire for presidential candidates to visit.
While there, she’d been first noticed by the right for her reporting in the school newspaper. She’d continually stated that the media was “frankly crooked, unjust, unfair, and sometimes just plain old false.”
Upon graduation, she’d taken a job at the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence and quickly risen through the ranks to be a major player in handling the correspondence from the president that included greetings to private citizens, in which the chief executive acknowledged individual milestones such as birthdays, marriages, and graduations.
Soon, she was hanging with the MAGA crowd. She got their support to run in 2022 for the United States House of Representatives. She ran a tough campaign, replete with a “gun shoot” at a popular fish and game club. She still couldn’t believe she’d lost to a Democrat who was openly gay.
So, what if she had over $300,000 in unpaid campaign debts? She hadn’t hidden them, just forgotten to pay them.
Now she was Donald Trump’s press secretary and worked in the West Wing.
She hadn’t complained when she was given a tiny office. The usual press secretary’s office had been taken over by Trump’s chief of staff.
She hurried into her daily staff meeting. A meeting held each morning in which she led them in a team prayer, asking for the ability to articulate her leader’s words for the world to hear.
She still proudly remembered her first press conference. So what if she’d stated that $50 million of taxpayer dollars had been used for funding condoms in the Gaza Strip? Anyone could have made a mistake like that.
The fact was, she liked it when Trump complimented her for barring certain areas of the White House as off limits to any news organization unless it referred to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
As she began to speak, she noticed that her staff was staring at her in a strange way. Finally, she couldn’t stand it and asked, “What’s going on!” One of her staff members meekly answered that they’d never seen her when she wasn’t wearing her cross. Her hand flew up to her chest, and there was nothing there. In her haste, she’d forgotten to put it on.
She ducked out of the room and immediately called her husband, Nicholas Riccio. He wasn’t home! She tried desperately to find him so he could bring her cross to her. A real-estate developer from New Hampshire, Riccio was 32 years her senior. “Twice as old, twice as smart” was a famous saying, right? They’d already had one child, and another was on the way.
Now, suddenly desperate, she raced back into the meeting. “I need one of you to find me a cross to wear!” The group quickly dispersed and began running around the White House. In a few minutes, she had to go to the briefing room.
As Karoline began her daily briefing, she instinctively reached to rub the cross on her neck. This had always calmed her down and given her confidence. But today, there was no cross; there was not one to be found in the West Wing. So, instead, she bravely looked out at the room full of reporters and rubbed the only religious icon they’d been able to find. She softly stroked Steven Miller’s mezuzah.
