Blink and you’ll have missed her. Katie Zacharia lasted all of five days as White House press secretary, less than half a “Scaramucci”, the eleven-day record set by the motormouth host of The Rest is US Politics podcast and former Trump communications director.
Zacharia’s swift exit had nothing to do with the questions surrounding her status as a lawyer. So what if she potentially inflated her credentials? In Trumpland that’s the norm. Nobody would have given two hoots as long as she was good at her job. Very obviously, she was out of her depth. A series of rabbit-in-headlights interviews on Fox News sealed her fate.
Only one man is to blame for this fiasco: the President himself. It was Donald Trump who plucked the Ivanka lookalike from her punditry on fawning Maga news channels, Real America’s Voice and Newsmax, where the only qualification necessary is loyalty to the man himself, and gave her the job. He messed up, big time, and has landed himself in the soup. Admitting “Maybe it’s not for her,” was the closest Trump came to displaying any contrition or embarrassment.
Unmoored from reality and high on his own propaganda supply, Trump thinks he’s infallible, like the Popes of old. But his approval rating has dropped to a record low of 36 per cent, according to the latest Fox News poll.
On his social media feed he has gone from playing Jesus healing the sick to depravedly posting a video of mentally ill William Chapman being mauled by a tiger, followed by AI slop of himself wrestling the beast to the ground. On the world stage, he’s beating up President Zelensky and shamelessly letting Ukrainian civilians die for his vanity, greed and weakness towards the Russian President Vladimir Putin. On the home front, at the very heart of White House, his inner sanctum is a hot mess of infighting as the 3 November midterm elections draw near.
The more he rants and broods, the more palace intrigues swirl and paranoia sets in at the heart of his administration. America’s mad king in the Oval Office cannot be constrained. The fear of looming defeat, real or not, has loosened tongues and set off a power struggle inside the White House. Susie Wiles, Trump’s normally unflappable chief of staff, is one of the top targets of all the bitching and infighting. The fact that the President appointed Zacharia without bothering to consult the “Ice Maiden” has become a symbol of her melting status.
Asked about reports in Politico that Wiles was next for the chop, Trump furiously responded, “Total fake news… She has been with me since the beginning, is my trusted adviser and has my complete confidence.” But that hasn’t stopped rivals jostling for her job. The White House has become “the new Wild West”, one Trump ally told the Washington Post.
The non-stop leaks forced White House spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez to respond this week. “President Trump has assembled a strong, talented and united team focused on his America First agenda – not the egos and political games of anonymous outsiders.” That’s a sure sign of the extent of the turmoil, for which Zacharia was merely its most visible manifestation. She had barely wrapped up her first 15-minute briefing on Tuesday when the first knives from unnamed Trump officials were unsheathed.
“Her hiring and the briefing shows this White House is collapsing now that they’re facing real pressure,” a senior Trump administration official told the Daily Mail. “They have no idea who to hire. We’re entering wartime and they’re completely unequipped.”
Other officials blamed their colleagues for setting Zacharia up to fail. Her boss, the current White House communications director, Steven Cheung, doesn’t appear to have done much to support her. According to a CBS News reporter, Cheung has seized former press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s large office in the West Wing for himself, while Zacharia has been shunted into “the small corner office”.
Cheung doesn’t consider himself photogenic enough for the cameras but he knows how to fight. For Trump, that has always counted most. But the President didn’t expect the West Wing to become a circular firing squad. And now, with two weeks to go until the midterm elections, Trump lacks a press secretary to defend him from his own incompetence.