Katie Zacharia was on a media tour to save her job as White House press secretary on Friday when “Fox and Friends” host Lawrence Jones asked whether she wished she had disclosed never passing the bar exam, despite repeatedly claiming to be a lawyer. Zacharia’s response: “Those questions weren’t asked.” And therein lies the problem: It’s not a matter of qualifications — it’s a basic question about her background that U.S. President Donald Trump and his White House failed to vet. Zacharia’s stunningly short and turbulent tenure as press secretary is far from the biggest or most substantial foul-up of Trump’s second term. But it does rank remarkably high on the embarrassment quotient. In one fell swoop over the course of a week, the White House confirmed how rudderless, impulsive and hubristic its entire operation is — and with just a few weeks to go before voters render their judgment on it in the 2026 midterm elections. Trump fired Zacharia as press secretary on Friday, advisers told CNN, just five days after she started the job. Her tenure has set the new benchmark for brevity as a top Trump White House aide, halving the record set by first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci. (“A Scaramucci” has since become an informal unit measuring 11 days.) Given that Trump personally selected Zacharia and he is generally loath to admit he’s made a mistake, it took a pretty rough week to prompt her ouster. In her inaugural briefing on Tuesday, Zacharia spent most of a 14-minute appearance nervously reading from a script that she repeatedly stumbled over before calling on just three reporters from conservative-friendly outlets. Then she went on a stream of media appearances that only reinforced she would likely be a liability at the White House lectern. Trump subsequently pulled the plug without even giving her a second briefing. It’s embarrassing for a number of reasons. It’s not as if Zacharia was the product of a process that needed to be rushed; former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced her departure more than two months ago, on August 12. That’s plenty of time to make sure you have the right person. The White House did have a series of candidates, CNN has reported, but some of them suffered from the unforgivable deficit of having occasionally said negative things about Trump. Zacharia’s name emerged suddenly late in the process, after not being previously considered. And as with so many things, it appears those around Trump quickly turned his whim into reality. There are understandable reasons for why Trump might have thought she could do the job, of course. He had undoubtedly seen her defending him on cable news plenty of times, his preferred method for screening job candidates. But serving as press secretary isn’t the same as doing TV hits with often-friendly hosts. And her briefing performance was objectively brutal. Then the White House compounded its mess. It dispatched Zacharia on a media tour of friendly outlets, apparently in hopes of rallying support and showing she was up to the task. But it proved the opposite. She was peppered with tough questions from conservative Trump allies who were ostensibly worried about her ability to handle being the face of the White House’s messaging. And those appearances — more than the briefing — made Trump conclude that she “wasn’t ready for prime time,” a person with direct knowledge of his comments told CNN. One of those skeptical conservative Trump allies was Fox News’ Sean Hannity. On Tuesday night, he was reading from the typical playbook: bashing the “abusively biased, corrupt news media” for being mean to Zacharia. But during his interview with her Thursday night, he asked her a series of sober and probing questions. Trump on Friday bemoaned how Zacharia was “made to suffer like she’s suffered at the hands of the press.” But it’s a lot harder to make that argument when your own media allies have done the scrutinizing. (Some of them also dinged Zacharia for her resume inflation.) And similar to Hannity, the White House now has egg on its face after initially vouching for Zacharia. White House communications director Steven Cheung assured in an excitable social media post Tuesday morning that Zacharia had a “tremendous start” in which she “commanded the room.” A White House press release hailed her “commanding” performance and clipped what it cast as her highlights. Later in the week, Cheung insisted she would be remembered as “one of the all-time greats” by the end of Trump’s second term. Oops. But perhaps the worst part of this whole episode for the White House is that it further solidifies a pre-existing narrative of Trump’s chaotic leadership style and inability to effectively manage the federal government. There’s been plenty of grist for that mill, including Trump’s recently aborted decisions to run taxpayer-funded political ads and to live stream an execution — both of which 80%-plus Americans opposed. Earlier in his presidency, Trump rained chaos on the government by giving Elon Musk apparent carte blanche to do, seemingly, more or less whatever he wanted. Many people who were fired later had to be reinstated when it was discovered that, actually, they did really important jobs — or couldn’t legally be fired. There was Signalgate and the whiplash over Trump’s tariffs and the administration’s inability to get its story straight on the Iran war. Similar to Zacharia, Trump also removed officials shortly after the Senate confirmed them, including the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and his IRS commissioner. (In the latter case, he also removed the acting replacement after less than a week.) His first national security adviser was moved to another job after less than three months, thanks to Signalgate. And the American people appear to have noticed. A CNN poll in July showed they disapproved of Trump’s management of the federal government, 65 per cent-35 per cent. Fully 74 per cent of independents and even 28 per cent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents disapproved. “A Zacharia” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “a Scaramucci” does. But her tenure is an unforced error that gives voters a similar shorthand at a remarkably inopportune time for Trump.
