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On October 9, Newsmax commentator and conspiracy theorist Katie Zacharia was plucked from obscurity and named White House press secretary.
One week later, she was unceremoniously dumped after one disastrous press briefing and a series of brutally bad hits on Fox News.
Zacharia’s meteoric rise and even more meteoric fall is not a surprise. Trump regularly hires lying, incompetent and/or corrupt minions, then fires them if they are women and defends them forever if they are men. (The only tidbit of news Zacharia actually broke was the ousting of comically corrupt Trump retainer Kimberly Guilfoyle from her position as ambassador to Greece.)
Trump hires bad people because he is a megalomaniac and a fool who hires people on one criteria only: sycophantic loyalty to Donald Trump (for women like Zacharia, it helps if you look vaguely like his daughter Ivanka). And anyone who is willing to demonstrate sycophantic loyalty to a lying incompetent fascist is going to be a lying incompetent fascist themselves.
The making of a failed press secretary
Zacharia appears to have been grown in a lab expressly to fail as Trump’s press secretary.
She received her undergraduate and law degree from Christian conservative Pepperdine University, and then pursued a career in various parts of the right-wing griftosphere. She served as a law clerk for Advocates International, a Christian law firm, and as a legal advisor to Fix California, a right-wing California org trying to push the state Trumpward. She’s also been a senior communications advisor at Trump’s far right propaganda social media site Truth Social.
As you’d expect with that resume, Zacharia is an unhinged liar, bigot, and hyperpartisan conspiracy theorist. As reported by Judd Legum at Public Information, she posted repeatedly on Truth Social to promote Pizzagate and QAnon, the dangerous lie that Hillary Clinton, her 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta, and other Democrats and celebrities were involved in a cult involving child sexual abuse, cannibalism, and Satantic rituals.
“Democrats want to mask and rape your children. That’s their satanic platform,” Zacharia fumed in April 2022.
She also has embraced the QAnon theory that Trump is the all-knowing One chosen to fight the Democratic cabal. She’s speculated that he sends secret codes to supporters through signs like drinking from water bottles.
Obviously, this is exactly the sort of bizarre, debased sycophancy that Trump adores. But there are lots of bizarre unqualified sycophants to choose from. Trump can’t appoint them all to be press secretary, even if they only last five days each. Zacharia needed an extra something.
That extra something was being a Newsmax commentator and a guest on Fox.
Politico reports that Zacharia paid attention to Trump’s public schedule and to his Truth Social posts and figured out when he was likely to be mainlining his daily does of self-flattering lies from the right-wing liar bubble. She made sure she was on air to serve him those lies personally. Trump liked what he saw, inasmuch as Zacharia was flattering him on air and was conventionally attractive, like former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and Christofascist warmongering Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Other MAGA anchors and commentators vouched for Zacharia as well.
Ineffectual and largely invisible White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was reportedly trying to secure CNN blowhard Scott Jennings for the press sec role. (Politico reported over the weekend that Zacharia was actually set up for her hit interview with Hannity by Wiles.) But Trump was impatient and/or impulsive and/or just hated being told what to do. So he decided to follow his shriveled self-obsessed heart and throw Katie Zacharia out onto the global stage.
Where she immediately faceplanted.
An epic implosion
Zacharia conducted one press briefing. It lasted 14 minutes. She read awkwardly from her notes and took three questions, from Breitbart, the Daily Mail, and Fox, all right-wing pro-Trump outlets that were studiously non-confrontational. She also bumblingly referred to her husband as the president.
Joe Biden’s former Press Secretary Jen Psaki summed up the response: “Well that briefing was basically an SNL skit … except it wasn’t.”
Zacharia had one more public moment as press secretary.
Standing with Trump on the South Lawn before she was to travel with him to Alaska for a campaign rally, she was asked where she had passed the bar exam. She claimed she did so while working in China, which is impossible. Later she said she’d misheard the question.
But the more important point, as Judd Legum has reported, is that Zacharia has repeatedly claimed to be a lawyer even though she has never passed the bar (as she has now admitted). Her false statements could be prosecutable; a complaint has been filed in California, where Zacharia worked and where misrepresenting oneself as a lawyer is a misdemeanor.
Shortly after this series of debacles, Trump said he asked Zacharia, “Katie is this for you?” and then told her, “If I were you, I’d reconsider.”
The phrasing there, typically, obfuscates Trump’s own role in the disaster; he speaks as if Zacharia had unilaterally hijacked the role of press secretary. He utterly skips over the part where he is the literal president of the United States and that he himself hired Zacharia despite the fact that she was obviously completely unfit for the job.
Trump of course should never have put Zacharia on the podium. That has led some, like Clinton-era press secretary Joe Lockhart to sympathize with her.
“She is in fact a victim here,” he said. “She was thrown out there in a place where she wasn’t prepared.”
But this is nonsense. Zacharia is not a victim. She is a lying conspiracy theorist who desperately maneuvered herself to attract the attention of an image-obsessed fascist in hopes that she could gain money and fame by lying on his behalf. Sometimes fascists and liars harm each other in their scramble for power, but that doesn’t mean you should sympathize with any of them. On the contrary, if they damage each other, that’s all the better for democracy and decency.
By the same token, the fact that Karoline Leavitt was somewhat better at lying on Trump’s behalf does not redound to her credit, inasmuch as her job was supposed to be informing the American people, not telling lies. And if Scott Jennings takes the post and holds it for more than five days, that will not mean he is a good press secretary. It will mean that he is a lying fascist sycophant like all the rest of them.
Dysfunction is a feature
The truth is that every Trump appointee ranges from bad to catastrophic at their jobs.
Former Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer left office amid scandals about her husband sexually harassing her employees. FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly has a drinking problem and has used department resources to ferry around his country singer girlfriend. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was reportedly involved in a corrupt $220 million sweetheart deal with an ad company that shot spots of her riding around on a horse. (Noem also led ICE as it shot civilians in the street.) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth lost a war to a C-level power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is so unwilling to stand up to Trump that he allows the president to outfit him in oversized shoes.
And on and on.
Trump hires people who will tell him what he wants to hear, and what he wants to hear is the sound of his boots being licked. Some of his minions, like Zacharia and his personal assistant Natalie Harp, do seem to be sincere in their worship of Trump — which means they are manifestly delusional and unfit for any task, no matter how trivial.
Other hangers-on, like Rubio, seem to understand that crawling on their bellies like oozing worms is the path to power and self-enrichment. They also hope their cringing will allow them to accomplishing a range of other ugly personal schemes — including immiserating Cuba in pursuit of regime change, in Rubio’s case.
Whatever the balance of foolishness and corruption in each fascist stooge, the outcome is the same. Trump cannot hire good people because he is a bad and undisciplined person — and one important way in which he is a bad person is that he is morally opposed to ever hearing from anyone who disagrees with him, challenges him, or provides him with information which contradicts anything that happens to burble up from his vacuously hateful hindbrain. This is why he still does not know what tariffs are, or how health insurance works.
Zacharia is just the latest in a long line of dysfunctional crooks and bounders who exist to reflect the pathologies and evil of the Bounder in Chief. Incompetent fascist will be served by incompetent fascists. That is their curse, and, unfortunately, ours.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
This piece was worth reading just for the first statement "remember we were going to hire the best people". The news from the US federal government has made me incapable of laughing but it brought a broad smile to my face.
He never hired the best people. Case in point: the first 2 years of The Apprentice. Wharton alum hired the Wharton alumns. That’s snobbery, not expertise.