Katie Zacharia, You Weren’t That Bad
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As many are delighting in pointing out, Katie Zacharia lasted just .4 Scaramuccis in the White House. The new press secretary left the role after only five days, beating the previous record of 11 days that was set by Anthony Scaramucci during the first Trump administration. Just about everyone, Scaramucci very much included, seems to be reveling in her speedy exit. In some ways, it feels like a throwback to Trump’s first term: Bye, lady whose name most of never bothered learning!
But Yet alongside my feeling that anyone who goes to work for that man and that administration gets what’s coming to them sits the tiniest bit of sympathy for Zacharia. I decided to refresh my memory about why Scaramucci got fired, and as I re-discovered, it was partly because of how colossally badly he came off in a New Yorker piece (by Ryan Lizza—speaking of throwbacks!) where he was quoted saying several vulgar things, among them, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”
Video from Slate
Zacharia, as far as we know, did not call any reporters to accuse anyone in the Trump administration of engaging in acts of self-pleasure.
And was her performance at her first press briefing on Tuesday really so that bad? After hearing all week about how disastrous it was, when I actually sat down to watch it, I was surprised. Yes, she spent most of the 14-minute briefing reading a probably not particularly factual script touting all the amazing things President Trump is doing for the country, and she wasn’t an especially fluid reader. But Trump’s press secretaries often lie and are frequently sound awkward. Critics pointed to how she only took questions from three outlets, at least two of them reliably conservative, and seemed unprepared, but when the whole way the administration interacts with the press is a farce and has been for a long time, what weight do criticisms like this hold? It’s true that Zacharia was also caught in a lie over her credentials: Though she represented herself as a lawyer, she never passed the bar, a detail she tried to fudge when the press asked her about it. This once might have been disqualifying, and still ought to be, in the context of Trump World, it now hardly registers: Members of the Trump administration have done much worse and kept their jobs.
Later in the week, Zacharia went on Fox News to attempt to smooth all this over, but instead of throwing the softballs she might have expected, anchor Sean Hannity asked her some pretty direct questions, and she once again failed to acquit herself well. The same was true when she appeared on Fox & Friends after that. Both are shows that Trump himself is known to watch.
As my colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick wrote on Thursday, before Zacharia was given the heave-ho but after the tides seemed to have turned against her, her real sin may have been that she was a clumsier, less brazen liar than her predecessors. Though Zacharia looked the part, with her long blond locks and Fox News makeup, it seems that she lacked Karoline Leavitt’s killer instinct, and that was part of what did her in. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins seemed to confirm this narrative when she shared on Twitter on Friday after Zacharia’s ouster that sources told her Trump had been embarrassed by the press secretary’s performance. Trump “wanted more people defending him on TV,” Collins wrote. “When she failed to do so in a sufficient way with Sean Hannity, Trump said he knew she needed to go.” It seems like everyone is laughing at Zacharia for being incompetent, but Trump’s most competent press secretaries have been his most evil ones, the ones most willing to treat reporters viciously and defend him no matter what. It’s hard to justify cheeringcheer for Zacharia’s ouster when it will almost inevitably mean she will be replaced with a bigger and better liar.
To the extent that Scaramucci lives on in anyone’s memory, as a person and a unit of time, it’s because he made an impression. He was a cocky dude in aviator shades with loose lips, a legible character among the many of Trump’s first term. Zacharia’s tenure may be remembered for its briefness, but Zacharia herself didn’t make enough of an impression in the first place to be forgotten. That this felt like an entertaining flameout shows just how low we’ve sunken.