A little more than a year ago, Beni Rae Harmony was told to show up to work at 5 a.m. to clean out her desk. The 24-year-old Illinois television host had just resigned from WICS-ABC20 after station management pulled her off the air.
Her transgression? An emotional tribute to Charlie Kirk, her former boss and mentor, just days after his assassination.
Harmony said she had been ordered by her employers at the local station to remove a clip of the tribute from her personal social media, but she refused and submitted her two weeks’ notice. Twenty minutes after doing so, she was told not to bother finishing her time there.
“‘Your key card has been deactivated. Be here at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning to clean out your desk,’” Harmony recalled being told. “‘Your services are no longer needed.’”
So she went in the next morning, packed up her belongings, and walked away. Harmony said she “never turned back,” and her career trajectory has only skyrocketed, because on Monday, October 5, 2026, Harmony walked into the White House as its newest assistant press secretary.
“And so that is where the new journey begins,” Harmony told IW Features. It’s an extraordinary reversal for a young journalist whose career, by her own account, had been built less around a master plan with five-year goals and more so around a willingness to keep moving when unexpected doors open up
“My motto has kind of always been, ‘When a door opens, peek through it,’” Harmony said. “That door is opening for a reason.”
Harmony didn’t even grow up dreaming of being an anchor on television. She initially studied pre-law, hoping to someday go into international law, and then spent time in Washington, D.C., interning in politics before deciding at 19 years old that she was too young to have the world figured out. Harmony then moved to Nashville, worked around the music industry, and eventually found herself returning home to Illinois.
There, she became a radio DJ and spotted an opening at the local television station, WICS, which she had grown up watching.
“I learned how to talk on the radio. I learned how to tell stories there,” she said.
WICS eventually hired her to host and report for its community-focused lifestyle programming. Harmony recalled how the station drilled a politically neutral demeanor into her––even an inadvertent social media interaction with political content could have earned her a reprimand.
Harmony was approaching the halfway point of her two-year contract with WICS and had even recently signed with an agent, fully leaning into the traditional television news timeline, when, on September 10, 2025, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University. His assassination was much more than just a national news story for Harmony, as Kirk had been her first boss at Turning Point USA.
“I went back to my desk, and I just started sobbing,” she said.
Days later, she ended her show with a personal tribute to him––no script needed, just words from her heart, hurt by the tragedy. After a viewer asked her to post the segment online, she did. But station management was not pleased with her actions, Harmony recalled.
Harmony said that station management instructed her to take the video down, but she refused. The following Monday, a supervisor told her she would no longer have her show “until further notice.”
So, with no prospects of hosting her show, Harmony resigned that day. WICS later disputed Harmony’s characterization that she had been suspended, saying she chose to resign. But from Harmony’s perspective, their suppression of her ability to appear on air forced the resignation.
The incident ended up going viral. Harmony watched as strangers online criticized her, and people she had even known personally turned their backs on her. But job offers came, too. Newsmax gave her a ring, and so did Real America’s Voice (RAV)––a network that had previously tried to recruit her.
So ultimately, “with the bad came so much good,” Harmony reflected. “It really, I think, groomed me and prepared me for the world that I’m in now––the criticism––because I saw some awful things [said] about me.”
Within weeks, she packed up again, but this time for Washington, D.C.
“When RAV called, it just felt like home,” she said. “I didn’t even wait to get any other offers.”
Harmony started at Real America’s Voice on October 6, 2025. Over the course of the next year, she rose to become a senior White House correspondent, traveling with President Donald Trump and covering his administration from inside the press corps.
Then, another door opened. During a September presidential trip to Ireland, Harmony noticed President Trump repeatedly calling on her. At the Irish Open, while other reporters questioned the president on political topics, Harmony thought she’d ask whom he’d most like to golf with. Later, another reporter asked whether President Trump had decided on a new press secretary.
“‘Well, I might’ve met her this weekend,’” Harmony recalled the president responding. She did not think he meant her.
Yet three days after returning home, Harmony received a call from a White House representative.
“‘I spoke with the president, and he wanted me to offer you a job if you’re interested,’” Harmony recalled the representative saying.
Her arrival into the president’s sphere comes at an unusual time for the White House communications operation. Karoline Leavitt left the administration at the end of August after having become the youngest White House press secretary in history. President Trump has not named a permanent successor, which leaves the press shop in transition as Republicans enter the final stretch before the November 3rd midterm elections. Those elections will determine control of Congress and, alongside it, how much room the president has to advance his agenda during the remainder of his term. Republicans are fighting to protect narrow congressional margins as the President has embarked on a month-long campaign push to rally voters ahead of Election Day.
Harmony will now help communicate that agenda from the other side of the cameras as an assistant press secretary.
When reflecting on her career path, Harmony explained that she had been no stranger to being told the future she imagined was out of reach. As a high school senior, she once told a civics teacher she dreamed of becoming a U.S. ambassador.
“He looked at me and said, ‘I’m sorry, Beni, but you’re not smart enough,’” she recalled.
Harmony never finished college. She was not, she admitted, a particularly good student. But she kept working, building critical relationships, and saying yes to opportunities.
“I’ve always just thought, ‘No, I’m going to break through the box. You just watch,’” she said.
Now, having entered the White House, Harmony told IW Features she thinks less about proving people wrong and more about feeling gratitude toward what those painful moments taught her.
Of the woman who walked out of WICS last September, Harmony said she would tell her she’s so proud of her, “because in those moments, they were the hardest moments of my life.” There was doubt, she admitted, inevitably wondering whether she had gone too far or whether she should have just stayed quiet.
She’s glad she did not. And for other young women who find themselves wondering whether standing up for what they believe is worth the risks, Harmony now has an answer: “If you feel strongly about something, if you feel led to say something or called to say something, your voice is so important,” Harmony said. “And even if it shakes when you say it, it will echo through mountaintops.”
“Speak,” she added. “Use your voice because God gave it to you for a reason.”
