Katie Zacharia: the short goodbye

Playing roles for which she wasn’t qualified caught up with Katie Zacharia last week.

Her failure to pass a bar exam while presenting herself as an attorney slipped through on the smaller stages. But at the White House, her breathtaking lack of the skills required to be press secretary could not be masked or explained away.

Journalists divided on whether to sympathize. Was she a victim of a White House hiring process that barely warrants the name, or was she Icarus? Either way, it was not a week for the squeamish.

And any week that sees the emergence of Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s first term 11-day communications director, as a wise old head — been there, had that done to me — is bound to be surreal.

Jem Bartholomew covered a lot of ground succinctly in the Columbia Journalism Review:

If Trump is not hiring someone for an ability to craft a communications strategy, handle relations with journalists, or plant favorable media talking points, what exactly is a press secretary for? He is drawn to people with a certain skill set: kiss-the-ring fealty is high on the list. “She has an unblemished record of support,” Trump said, in an October 9 post on Truth Social announcing Zacharia’s hiring, “and has been a loyal and brilliant supporter, right from the beginning.” A willingness to repeat MAGA’s foundational untruths, no matter how outlandish, is another key qualification. (Zacharia made a bright start on that score, asserting on Tuesday that rally attendance “is at record highs as enthusiastic, hardworking Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump and Republicans,” despite C-SPAN footage that showed dozens of empty seats at a recent event in Texas.) But it’s not enough to lie. One must do so convincingly, and without hesitation. “You gotta lie like a machine-gunner at a turret in that job,” Scaramucci, who has been doing a comeback tour of TV networks in recent days, told CNN. “And Karoline Leavitt was really good at that. She lied with great impunity and great enthusiasm.” That, he implied, is where Zacharia failed.

Margaret Sullivan’s dissection of the week quoted writer Marat Oyvetsky:

Katie Zacharia’s first press conference had the atmosphere of a restaurant opening where the chef has just discovered fire is actually hot. She approached the prepared remarks as though they’d been written by ChatGPT and read through for the very first time. Each sentence seemed like a small, preventable tragedy.

Brian Stelter thought Zacharia’s flame-out shouldn’t overshadow what he regarded as the central point: Donald Trump’s view of the press:

What’s more important: President Trump’s rash hiring and firing of a White House press secretary, or his never-ending campaign to replace the press with his own unreality?

I’d say the latter. No matter who the press secretary is, or whether there even is one, the president will continue to set his own strategy. Although he’ll always covet cameras and microphones, he will demonize reporters, keep them out when he can, and try to replace them with propagandists.

Hard to argue with that. Katie Zacharia has come and gone, but Trump’s war on the press never ends.