No job is forever. Some barely exceed the lifespan of a mayfly. In the late nineteen-seventies, Madonna moved to New York to try to make it as a dancer and lasted about a week working at Dunkin’ Donuts. As she once explained breezily to Howard Stern, “I was playing with the jelly-squirter machine.”
Katie Zacharia, late of the Zhong Lun law firm, in Beijing (though not, strictly speaking, an attorney, as it turns out), has just set a new American record for shortest tenure as White House press secretary. She lasted about as long as Madonna did at Dunkin’ Donuts.
Zacharia brought to her work a gossamer résumé in the field of communications: a brief stint as a commentator at Newsmax and less than two months as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”
Zacharia’s one and only appearance in the White House press room took place on October 13th. It lasted fourteen minutes. She wore a pained smile and stumbled nervously through a written script. She took questions from Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail and delivered a terse announcement that the ineffable Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. Ambassador to Greece and former paramour of the President’s son Donald, Jr., would now be pursuing other career opportunities. At one point, Zacharia referred to her husband as “my president.” Jen Psaki, who had done the same job for Joe Biden, remarked, perhaps uncharitably, that the briefing “was basically an SNL skit . . . except it wasn’t.” After it was revealed that Zacharia had overstated her status as an attorney (she is not an attorney), and after a peculiar and decidedly disastrous appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox News, she was out.
To get some perspective on this episode, I reached out to Anthony Scaramucci, who, in the early days of the first Trump Presidency, lasted ten days as White House communications director before being shown the door. “Records are made to be broken,” he told me cheerfully while on vacation in Hawaii. “I am trying to lay low on this. I don’t believe in grave stomping,” he went on. “That podium is a hard podium, as we all know. But the universe did her a favor. She shouldn’t be in that job.”
Scaramucci, known to all as the Mooch, took pains to be gracious to Zacharia. “I’m not a hater of hers,” he said. “I don’t know her.” Though he added, dryly, that his emotions now were what Joe DiMaggio’s might have been if the Yankee Clipper’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, set in 1941, had been eclipsed. (It still stands.)
Arguably, Scaramucci’s tenure ended with greater drama than Zacharia’s did. The trouble began for him one day in July, 2017, when Scaramucci called The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza complaining about a tweet that cited a “senior White House official” as saying that Scaramucci had been dining at the White House with President Trump, the First Lady, the Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. In his job for under a week, Scaramucci began to hector the reporter about his source.
“You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country,” he said. “So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.” Scaramucci was concerned, above all, that some of his new colleagues, particularly the White House chief of staff at the time, Reince Priebus, were plotting against him.
Scaramucci’s only appearance at the press-room podium went more smoothly than anything managed by Zacharia, but it was soon evident that he was not going to countenance leaking—which, even in the earliest days, was rife in the Trump White House. With the reporter’s tape rolling, Scaramucci charged into a long string of invective, threats, and fury. He pronounced Priebus a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and said that the chief of staff had tried to “cock-block” him. Moreover, Scaramucci went on, he was not some attention-seeking peacock like some others in the nascent Administration. “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock,” he said. “I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.”
Scaramucci insinuated that disloyal aides around Trump would soon be on the receiving end of his ire and would be out of a job: “O.K., the Mooch showed up a week ago,” he said. “This is going to get cleaned up very shortly, O.K.? Because I nailed these guys. I’ve got digital fingerprints on everything they’ve done through the F.B.I. and the fucking Department of Justice.” By way of ending the call, Scaramucci said, “Yeah, let me go, though, because I’ve gotta start tweeting some shit to make this guy crazy.”
Soon after, this appeared on his Twitter account: “In light of the leak of my financial info which is a felony. I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept #swamp @Reince45.” And, within two hours, the Mooch deleted that tweet and, strangely, denied a report on Axios that he was going after Priebus at all. Several days later, John Kelly, Trump’s newly installed chief of staff, fired Scaramucci. A record for occupational brevity had been set, one that seemed likely to last for decades to come.
Scaramucci, who grew up on Long Island, had a career in finance before his truncated White House career. His politics veered all over the road. He supported Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, and, in 2016, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Before joining the Trump campaign that year, he had called Trump a “hack politician.” Scaramucci now regards the Trump Presidency, he told me, as a “disaster,” but quickly adds that, as a patriot, he wishes it were otherwise. These days, he writes books and hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics US,” with Katty Kay, a British journalist. He has called Trump “an orange wrecking ball” and a “sociopathic reality-TV star.” Recently, on the podcast “How to Fail,” he said the President grew “more malevolent” during the Biden years: “He’s, like, ‘Hey, man, I didn’t steal enough in the first term.’ He had four years to figure out how to steal more.”
By way of wishing his distant successor and record-breaker well, Scaramucci told me that after some initial struggles, he found his way. There was life after the White House press room. “I didn’t blame the firing on anyone but me,” he said. “If you play in the N.F.L. and get a concussion, you don’t blame the N.F.L.”
The truth was, he said, “I didn’t like the job. I can’t speak for [Zacharia], but for me the firing came with some level of relief. There is a feeling of humiliation, but also relief.”
Why was there relief? I asked.
“Have you ever worked for Donald Trump?” he said.
Not so far. Has he changed much?
“I think he is similar to the way he was, maybe more unhinged now, and people around him now—there are more lackeys. There are no John Kellys around.”
Does the President seem like a lesser person to you now?
“He could have age-related neurodegeneration, but he is the same person,” Scaramucci said. “Age is slowing him down, but he is an energetic eighty years old.” ♦