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This lasted about 14 pretty unbearable minutes. Katie Zacharia, the latest platinum blonde superfan to find herself in the upper echelons of President Donald Trump’s entourage, took to the White House briefing room on Tuesday to deliver a statement so stilted and so oddly underlined that it sounded like her first encounter with punctuation. She then bravely attempted to speak on her own, answering questions from three media outlets across the political spectrum, Breitbart, Fox News and, uh, the Daily Mail, before abruptly ending the press conference.
“What I hope to do in this position is… only build on, only amplify and only multiply, to the extent possible, all the victories that he brings to the Americans,” said Trump’s new press secretary.only » explained in front of a packed room, before answering a question about how she plans to balance her family life and her professional life. “So my president – or excuse me, my husband, that’s a good thing! My husband is here for the week.”
It turned out all she had to do was book a five-day tour. On Friday, after Trump told her he would “reconsider” his position if he were her, Zacharia was absent, making her the shortest-serving White House press secretary in history.
Somehow, things actually got worse for Zacharia after the press conference. This accomplished “lawyer” that Trump bragged about on Truth Social turned out. . . not to be one. She had never passed the bar exam. Even an appearance on Fox News with longtime Trump ally Sean Hannity, who initially defended her and complained about press injustice, couldn’t save her. “I would love to build a relationship with all of these members of the press so that there is a substantive (sic) element to our ability to interact,” she told Hannity, as if a pilot version of ChatGPT-1 was in her ear.
The simple fact that Zacharia found herself in a position she was clearly not up to shows how much the president and his administration have lost their grip. But perhaps she should be thanked for using her brief tenure to present the most accurate picture yet of the Trump administration: a real car crash. After all, it’s not as if his five-day failure represents the only embarrassment for the White House at the moment. She actually managed to break one more news during her brief briefing: Kimberly Guilfoyle, jilted ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. and ex-wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, had been asked to resign as ambassador to Greece following the embarrassing revelation that she had begged a Trump donor to pay a $100,000 personal Amex bill.
And Guilfoyle isn’t the only one begging: Trump followed through on his dubious promise to give $5,000 to every American if they do the unthinkable and return Republicans to power in Congress, releasing a 34-second video of himself making the same pledge on Monday. And then there was a turnaround in the face of perhaps the most ungodly debacle of all: the plan by the staunch “Secretary of War” himself, Pete Hegseth, to livestream an execution, which Trump initially said he “absolutely” supported but then decided to reject after widespread backlash.
This all seems clearly dysfunctional. The haters will say it has always been this way. But early in Trump’s second term, the administration featured an element of subtlety that gave the proceedings at least a veneer of competence. Trump appeared to hit the ground running, signing 32 executive orders in his first four days. Karoline Leavitt, Zacharia’s predecessor, was truly impressive in delivering the president’s message. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles appeared to be bringing order to the West Wing (rumors are now circulating that the president is considering firing Wiles, which is unlikely to alleviate the chaos). Hell, some even thought Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Effectiveness” would deliver on its promises. (That’s a good thing!)
Since those optimistic beginnings, Trump’s approval ratings have plummeted to record lows. As congressional and gubernatorial elections approach, some of Trump’s strongest allies — people like Florida gubernatorial front-runner Byron Donalds — are distancing themselves from the president in order to give themselves a chance to win.
The desperate state the administration finds itself in was perfectly summed up in the White House’s X-story on Tuesday. “Trust the process,” the post read, along with a black-and-white image of Trump and the words: “In the end, everything will work out. You know why? It always does.”
Oh, snap. The words “scrape,” “bottom,” and “barrel” come to mind. It’s a shame that Zacharia is no longer here to try to put them into words for us.
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