On Friday, President Trump announced his new White House press secretary. Her name is Katie Zacharia. She’s blonde, telegenic, and she’s spent the last several years defending the president on Fox News and Newsmax. Her most recent job was doing communications for Trump Media, the company that runs Truth Social. Before that, she spent a short stint as a spokeswoman at the Department of Homeland Security. Beyond that, the résumé gets thin.
Trump, for his part, said she had “an unblemished record of support” and called her “a devoted fan and member of MAGA.” That’s obviously the key skillset to work in this White House.
But Zacharia herself is not particularly interesting. Blind loyalty and slavish devotion rarely are.
Instead, the question I keep asking myself is: Why would anyone want this job right now?
Look at what the next White House press secretary walks into. A war with Iran that has become a political albatross for the GOP. Prices that keep climbing at the grocery store and the gas pump. A president whose approval numbers keep finding new lows, and a blue wave building on the horizon ahead of November. And, every day, the new press secretary will walk into that briefing room and be expected to tell the country that all of it is going wonderfully.
This Was Always The Job Description
The truth is, being Trump’s Press Secretary has been impossible from the very first day.
Do you remember Sean Spicer’s first appearance in the briefing room on the administration’s first full day in office? He walked out and insisted that Trump’s inauguration had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.”
Everyone had seen the photos and knew it wasn’t true. But the option to maintain personal credibility went out the window the second Spicer accepted the job of defending the indefensible.
In fairness to Spicer, he’d spent years running communications at the Republican National Committee in the pre-Trump era, and I don’t think he fully appreciated what he was signing up for. The people who came later knew exactly what the job was.
Trump’s last three picks for the podium, Kayleigh McEnany, Karoline Leavitt, and now Zacharia, look and sound a lot less like White House staff than like a cable news lineup. McEnany went straight to Fox News after the White House. Leavitt is reportedly headed there now. Zacharia came up through those same green rooms. It turns out the alternate universe of conservative cable news is a perfect training ground for Trump press secretaries.
At her very first briefing, Kayleigh McEnany looked into the cameras and promised, “I will never lie to you.” A few months later, after Bob Woodward released tapes of Trump saying he’d wanted to play the COVID-19 virus down, she stood at the podium and insisted the president had never downplayed it. After the 2020 election, she held a press conference claiming widespread fraud, and it was so baseless that Fox News cut away from her live.
Karoline Leavitt picked up right where McEnany left off. In her first weeks on the job, with a straight face she told reporters the administration had stopped fifty million dollars from going to buy condoms for Gaza. Then, when The Atlantic revealed that top officials had discussed upcoming strikes in Yemen on a group chat that accidentally included a journalist, she insisted no war plans had been discussed. The magazine then published the messages, timing of the strikes and all.
Like any lie, every one of those moments left the person who said it diminished. When you stand at that podium and debase yourself day after day, your credibility goes first. Then, so does your self-respect.
Who Signs Up for This?
So what kind of person looks at all of that and raises her hand? The true answer, the one that everyone in DC knows but won’t say out loud, is uncomfortable.
When a job requires you to defend corruption and incompetence with a smile, the people most eager to do it are the people least fit to be anywhere near it. And that brings us back to Zacharia.
Over the past few days, reporters have dug through her years of posts online, and what they found is shocking, but not surprising. On Truth Social, she pushed the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, the debunked claim that Democratic elites were running a child sex ring.
She wrote, in a post that is reportedly still up, that “the radical left Hollywood elitists” are “sick pedo cannibals.” She engaged with QAnon numerology and promoted the fantasy that Trump secretly kept control of the military while Joe Biden was president. On X, before she deleted them, she spread false vaccine claims and urged the president to seek a third term the Constitution forbids.
In any normal administration, Republican or Democrat, someone with that record wouldn’t get within a mile of the White House, let alone be handed its podium.
That’s where the Republican Party is right now. Yes, people like Zacharia have always existed. Every movement has its fringe. It’s that the fringe is now being hired at the highest levels of the US government, because the people who would have been qualified for this job in ordinary times want nothing to do with it.
Enjoy It While It Lasts
So, to Katie Zacharia, and everyone else signing on for the final stretch of this administration, I’d say this: enjoy the next two years. Enjoy the podium, the motorcade, and the airtime.
Because when Donald Trump leaves office, the people who spent his presidency defending the indefensible are going to find that the doors which matter, the serious institutions, the respected firms, the rooms where the country’s work actually gets done, are closed to them.
Two years can feel like a long time when you’re living it. But it won’t feel that way later. Sean Spicer has said he regrets standing at that podium and lying about the crowd size. The people taking this job now are signing up for something far worse.
Someday all of this will be in the rearview mirror. The war, the lies, the podium. And when it is, the people who stood up there will have the rest of their lives to reckon with what they said.
That’s when they’ll realize how short a time two years really was, and how long a time the rest of a life can be.
— Adam
Think about it…what other job would have any of these women?
They embarrass us, these women