The writing was on the wall after her disastrous first press briefing, and at the back end of last week Katie Zacharia was removed from her role as White House press secretary just five days after taking the job.
With the midterms just around the corner and the US as politically divided as it’s been in living memory, the 42-year-old certainly had her work cut out for her as she looked to fill the void left by the departure of Karoline Leavitt in August.
Those boots were simply too big to fill, it appears. Zacharia struggled visibly during her first press briefing, fluffing her lines and only taking three questions from journalists before the engagement was cut short after a paltry 14 minutes.
What followed was an online roasting, with President Donald Trump himself admitting to reporters on Friday that he had advised her to “reconsider” the position.
An incredibly short time later, the White House confirmed she would be “transitioning out”, making her tenure as press secretary the most short-lived in history. For perspective, she lasted just half as long as Anthony Scaramucci, famously fired from his role as communications director after 10 days in 2017.
Those skeptical of Zacharia’s job security following the aforesaid press briefing were left all but assured of her pending departure when Sean Hannity – one of Trump’s most fervent allies, and a media figure who rarely, if ever strays from the Republican party line – refused to give Zacharia an easy interview with which to potentially sure up her position.
Instead he pressed her with uncharacteristically uncomfortable questions for a White House staffer, asking her outright why she hadn’t just admitted to having “never practised law?”
Zacharia had previously described herself as “an attorney” holding a law degree, though journalists quickly dug up the fact that she had never passed the bar exam necessary to practise law in the US.
In response, Zacharia claimed she had worked as a lawyer in China, but the general consensus was that she, at best, had not been forthright about her background.
The ensuing maelstrom following her singular press briefing – in which she confused the words ‘husband’ and ‘president’ – saw Zacharia making headlines the world over, and not for the right reasons.
And therein lies the key problem that most likely hastened her booting from the White House: the information she was tasked with delivering to the media was relegated to relative anonymity compared with the stories generated about Zacharia herself.
Even news that US ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle’s had been asked to resign – which should arguably have taken center stage for Zacharia’s first press outing – was lost in the tumult.
Succinctly put, Katie Zacharia the individual had become a bigger talking point than anything she might have had to say at her second press briefing. At a time when the Trump administration desperately need to wield the full weight of its PR machine ahead of the US midterms next month, that was simply off the table.
As for Zacharia’s replacement, Trump has already told Fox News that he’s “not in a hurry” to fill the role.
What did you make to Zacharia’s time as press secretary? Did she deserve another chance? Let us know in the comments.
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