Newly minted White House press secretary Katie Zacharia wasted no time taking up her position at the briefing room podium on Tuesday. Arguably, she might have benefited from doing some more preparation before entering the lion’s den a mere four days after her appointment was officially unveiled.
Her appearance lasted just 13 minutes, most of which was taken up with relentlessly touting “hard-working Americans … lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump” as he campaigns for Republican candidates three weeks before the midterm elections.
“We are in the middle of a midterm blitz with energy and excitement never seen before in the history of midterms,” gushed the 41-year-old attorney, a former communications adviser for the Trump Media and Technology Group, which operates Trump’s Truth Social platform.
Buried in her PR presentation was the bombshell disclosure that Trump has asked Kimberly Guilfoyle, his beleaguered ambassador to Greece (and former partner of Donald Trump Jr), to resign over growing allegations of corruption.
“We have asked ambassador Guilfoyle to resign, she has been a wonderful asset to the team and we wish her well,” said Zacharia, following reports that Guilfoyle sought payment from a Trump donor in exchange for access to administration officials. She denies any wrongdoing
Zacharia, a regular commentator for conservative news outlets including Fox News and Newsmax, took questions from only three organisations: Breitbart News, Fox News and the Daily Mail.
Asked by reporters how she would balance being a mother of four with the demanding job, she accidentally referred to her husband as “my president”, before calling Trump “the most family-friendly President we’ve ever had”.
Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked the only bouncer of the session. “Has the US stopped sharing intel with Ukraine?” he enquired.
“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” answered Zacharia.
She then departed the podium, insisting that Trump would speak for himself as he headed out to Marine One for yet another campaign swing in Alaska.
Naming Zacharia as a replacement for Trump “It Girl” Karoline Leavitt on Friday, the President was enthusiastic. “She has an unblemished record of support, and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning,” he said. “She is, likewise, a devoted fan and member of Maga!”
In the hours leading up to her debut, the new press secretary was not helped by a stream of damaging revelations concerning her past embrace of QAnon and dark-web conspiracy theories.
On Monday, CNN and The Bulwark reported that Zacharia had scribed a series of now-deleted social media diatribes making baseless accusations of paedophilia against prominent Democrats. In one post that remained active on Truth Social as late as Tuesday, she claimed that the “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals” and challenged users to try to “change my mind”.
Zacharia has long amplified the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which targeted Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election and made entirely false claims that leading Democrats were abusing sex-trafficked children in the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant. No abuse occurred, the restaurant has no basement and the claims were comprehensively debunked, but they continue to fuel false allegations that top Democrats are child abusers.
In June 2025, as Trump’s brutal mass deportation campaign was being implemented by agents with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Zacharia called for the suspension of habeas corpus in a post on X that has since been deleted.
She approvingly amplified claims by Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff and the President’s chief ideologue, who asserted that Democrats were engaged in a “criminal conspiracy … to end the sovereignty of the United States” by offering sanctuary to illegal immigrants. In the same month, Zacharia called on Trump to “take over all of California”, arguing the most populous state in the nation “can’t be trusted to do a single thing”.
In September 2025, she falsely claimed that “left transgender assailants” had been responsible for “at least a dozen” school shootings in America. Last month, she launched a racist assault on Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Party’s candidate for a Senate seat in his native Michigan, calling him “an indictment of our immigration system under Democrats”.
A regular pro-Trump commentator on propaganda networks, Zacharia has left a long trail of publicly voiced extremism. Zacharia, who sat on the advisory board for an anti-abortion group, falsely claimed on a podcast last year that the abortion pill mifepristone “has the same chemicals they used in the extermination camps in Nazi Germany” (it does not).
For several years, Zacharia has embraced fringe views on public health, calling Bill Gates “a eugenicist” in May 2022 and in another now-deleted post, claiming falsely in September 2021 that “eight in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the Covid vaccine”.
Zacharia has repeatedly claimed the 2020 presidential election was stolen and not legitimately won by Joe Biden. She has also urged Trump to seek an unconstitutional third term in office.
Formerly the gatekeeper for hard-right rottweiler Ric Grenell, acting director of national intelligence and US ambassador to Germany in Trump’s first term, Zacharia is fused at the hip with some of the most extremist voices in the President’s inner circle. In her new role, she will be required to exercise a degree of control sorely lacking in her earlier experiences, and, now on the public payroll, may struggle to observe the rules that are supposed to prevent any presidential press secretary from engaging in political campaigning.
Only last month, Zacharia observed on X that: “President Trump does not need a spokesperson. He is his own best press secretary”. Now she is in the job, she will have to hope that Trump does not rapidly reach the same conclusion.