Trump’s botched execution of Katie Zacharia speaks volumes about Susie Wiles’ future

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IIt took Susie Wiles no more than a few days to put an end to the buzz in Washington that predicted her tenure as chief of staff was over.

The rumors began swirling Thursday when Policy reported that President Donald Trump had called his friends and informal advisers to ask if they thought he should replace Wiles, his longest-serving chief of staff.

Citing four sources with direct knowledge of the president’s conversations, the outlet reported that Trump had proposed several names for the successor to the veteran Florida politician, who is the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff.

A day later, other reports said Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp brought him articles about the possibility of replacing Wiles, which caused him to derail and call even more allies, with another source saying Wiles and her team were frantically calling people across the city to vouch for her in turn.

Evidence of Wiles’ tentative hold on his position had emerged at the White House days earlier in the form of Katie Zacharia, whom Trump had hired as press secretary the previous Friday without informing Wiles, who had been working for weeks to secure CNN’s resident MAGA voice, Scott Jennings, as Karoline Leavitt’s replacement.

It lasted from Monday to Friday.

During her 14 minutes on the podium Tuesday, Zacharia hesitantly read from a script for eight of those minutes, answered three questions from friendly media, referred to her husband as “my president” and announced the firing of the ambassador to Greece as she walked out.

The same day, she was pressed by reports that she had never passed the state bar, despite introducing herself as a “lawyer” in several television appearances over the past year.

The story heated up Wednesday and Thursday as Zacharias attempted to clean up the mess by asserting some difference between the terms “attorney” and “attorney” before admitting that she failed the California bar exam and never took it again.

That’s when Wiles appears to have struck.

That night, Zacharia appeared on Fox News host – and close Trump confidant – Sean Hannity’s show for a disaster of an interview that was as bad, if not worse, than his brief briefing a few days earlier.

Hannity opened her show by telling Zacharia that her briefing had been “widely criticized,” then walked Zacharia through the bar exam question until Zacharia admitted that she never took it again.

Another blow on the Fox and friends Friday’s morning show didn’t go much better, and by the end of the day, Zacharia received the boot minutes after Trump told reporters he told her she should “reconsider” her decision to take the job.

A source said Policy that Fox’s bookings were a “sanctioned hit,” and another source was more direct, describing the chief of staff as having “given it to Hannity.”

The denials were swift and came from everywhere, with White House communications director Steven Cheung calling the report “fiction that’s not even creative” and a senior White House official alleging that Wiles “didn’t need to give it to Sean or anyone else” because “that’s not his style.”

Fox News said The Independent that Hannity books her own guests and that “Susie Wiles and Danielle Alvarez had nothing to do with the booking.” Others suggested that Zacharia sealed his fate Tuesday in the briefing room without any help from anyone.

Does any of this matter? Not really, because the message sent by the rapid ousting of the former press secretary was clear.

After the president bypassed his chief of staff to hire an unqualified television personality as his chief spokesperson, his choice was taken down on his favorite television network within 72 hours, leading him to fire her himself on the South Lawn while Marine One sat idly behind him.

If anyone had spent the last week measuring the curtains in the chief of staff’s office, seeing Zacharia’s skin nailed to Wiles’ wall was a useful warning.

Unlike Zacharia, on the short end of the scale, Wiles held his job longer than anyone who held Trump’s job over two administrations, and the West Wing went two years without the flight wars that characterized 2017.

Going around Wiles to hire the second press secretary of his second term produced, on a compressed timetable, exactly the kind of personal disaster his process aims to prevent – no one in White House control even asked Zacharia about the bar exam, as she herself told Fox & Friends the next morning.

Trump, who is known for lying about such things, later said there was “zero chance” he would replace Wiles and that she had his “ENTIRE trust,” a White House spokesperson said. The Independent last week that “these anonymous sources know nothing”.

These statements are worth what they usually are. The demonstration is worth much more.

Meanwhile, the names still floating around to replace Wiles are mostly men Trump knows from TV, in Palm Beach, or on the campaign trail — the same “central casting” process that just produced five days of Katie Zacharia. Anyone on this list would do well to study what happened to the last person to arrive by this route.

Wiles’ superpower was never that Trump couldn’t get around her. It’s because he didn’t do it.

He did it once, and the whole world got to see how it ended.