Settling in for a seven-hour flight across the continent this week, U.S. President Donald Trump offered little indication there was anything wrong.
His new press secretary’s rocky 14-minute debut at the White House podium was being met with decidedly negative reviews. An hour later, she’d offered a perplexing response when asked where she’d passed the bar exam. His own advisers had watched it all with a degree of horror.
Trump, however, told Katie Zacharia on the flight to Alaska that she performed well, a source familiar with the conversation told CNN. It was her first time on Air Force One.
Three days and an onslaught of scrutiny later, Zacharia was dismissed from her post, summarily ending the shortest stint as White House press secretary in anyone’s memory. Plans to move east from California with her family were put on hold. It was all, multiple Trump advisers said, a real flop.
“I said, ‘Is this for you, Katie?’” Trump said Friday, after he’d fired her. “Because honestly, you don’t need this.”
The entire episode underscored the uneasy atmosphere that has pervaded Trump’s inner circle less than three weeks before the midterm elections. Zacharia’s sudden hiring and equally swift firing were a product of Trump’s impulse to hire a loyal television defender he’d grown somewhat enamored with from afar, without much thought to the other requirements of the job.
In a statement for this story, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said: “All of this breathless speculation is just that— speculation. And it’s fiction that’s not even creative. The fact is that Katie took on a very important job, and she will continue to support the president as she transitions to a new role. She is an amazing teammate and tremendous talent.”
CNN has reached out to Zacharia for comment.
Some Trump advisers watched her brief tenure unfold with a measure of chagrin, wondering how one of the government’s most visible and sought-after jobs could have gone to someone with so little experience or confidence in performing it.
“What the f**k is happening over there?” one Trump adviser asked incredulously after watching the newly installed Zacharia conduct her first, widely panned press briefing.
The new press secretary, multiple advisers said, appeared woefully underprepared — and lacked basic skills to do the job.
“Did anyone vet her?” one asked.
The short answer, it turned out, was no, according to multiple White House officials and advisers.
Instead, her selection came amid a burst of frustration on the part of the president that a month ahead of the midterms, there were few voices defending him amid unrelenting coverage of Republicans’ dwindling midterm prospects.
Until that point, the president had shown no real urgency in filling the role Karoline Leavitt vacated at the end of the summer. Advisers and allies had floated names, none of which seemed to seriously pique Trump’s interest. White House officials had become resigned to the possibility there would be no press secretary before the midterms.
But the intensifying political problems for Republicans — and the blame Trump was catching for the party’s woes — appeared to kickstart his search. After struggling for weeks to land a new press secretary, Trump suddenly became fixated on filling the role, complaining to advisers he had no one pushing his message, multiple sources familiar with the matter said.
Into that anger emerged a benevolent voice: Zacharia, cable news regular, passionate defender, sometimes labeled an attorney on TV. What about Katie? Trump asked advisers, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, a source familiar with the matter said. The president also sought Leavitt’s counsel.
Only a week earlier, Zacharia was not being considered for the role. Throughout the search to replace Leavitt, the White House struggled with higher-profile names, several of whom had previously criticized Trump. On multiple occasions, senior officials had narrowed down the list, only to find that candidates had said something negative about the president, disqualifying them from the position, according a White House official.
Zacharia’s record was “unblemished,” Trump would later say. Among her boosters in the West Wing was Natalie Harp, the loyal Trump aide who travels with him everywhere, a source familiar with the matter said.
On Wednesday last week, officials arranged a phone call between Zacharia and the president. Zacharia flew to Washington a day later. By Friday, she was in the Oval Office.
During their conversation, which Wiles was not present for, Trump spontaneously offered Zacharia the job, a source familiar with the matter said. Aides rushed to inform Wiles of the decision.
“I got a wonderful phone call from the chief talent recruiter, the president himself, and it turns out that being a huge supporter of all of his policies actually works,” Zacharia said during a Fox News interview last Friday evening.
That interview aired at the same time Trump was speaking at a rally in Syracuse, N.Y. For some longtime Trump advisers, it was the first sign of trouble. Counter-programming the president’s events with a TV hit has long been seen as a faux pas for underlings — including for Cabinet officials and top administration officials.
If Trump noticed, however, he didn’t let on. By Sunday evening, he announced Zacharia would convene her first “introductory” briefing bright and early Tuesday morning.
After another round-trip flight between Washington and California, Zacharia was up at 3 a.m. Tuesday to prepare. Her materials weren’t finalized until 90 minutes before she walked into the briefing room.
The lack of preparation showed. Her delivery during the opening was halting, even though she was reading from a laudatory boilerplate script about Trump’s record.
“Some people have it and some people do not,” one senior administration official said. “She does not. She couldn’t command the room.”
When the time came for questions, she didn’t know whether the U.S. had cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine — an inquiry that could have easily been anticipated.
She did announce that Kimberly Guilfoyle had been asked to resign from her post as ambassador to Greece, which Zacharia later used as an example of how successful the outing had been.
“I think I’m one of the first press secretaries to deliver staff changes for the administration,” she said later in the week, as her future was becoming increasingly bleak. “And I was honored that President Trump trusted me delivering that information.”
That would end up being the only real information she delivered in the job.
Though Trump did not initially think her performance at her first press briefing was particularly bad, he later became embarrassed by the coverage.
Other signs also emerged of Zacharia’s inexperience. During Trump’s visit to Alaska following her maligned briefing, a source familiar with the matter said, Zacharia told White House officials she planned an interview for the president with a Fox News reporter following the rally. But she was quickly warned the president didn’t like to do anything after his events, having just performed for two hours. The preference was well known among Trump’s team.
Zacharia insisted it would be wise, and that the reporter was a friend, the source said. After Trump got off the stage and was ready to depart, Zacharia told him of the plan. Trump grew visibly irritated and said he wasn’t going to do it, the source said. Ultimately, he relented, but the episode was indicative to those around him that Zacharia did not yet understand the man she now worked for.
When Trump polled other senior aides about her, Zacharia had few allies willing to stand up for her or defend her performance, two people familiar with her ouster told CNN. Though many of these aides praised Zacharia’s performance to her face, they admitted privately she was not doing well.
Trump remarked to allies and advisers this week that perhaps she “wasn’t ready for primetime,” one person with direct knowledge of his comments told CNN.
As questions began to swell around her legal credentials — Zacharia had presented herself as a lawyer but there was no public evidence she had ever passed a bar exam — the Wall Street Journal reported that she had actually failed the exam. Zacharia later confirmed as much in public, claiming she had been told she could refer to herself as a “lawyer,” if not an “attorney.”
In fact, she had also repeatedly boosted social media messages referring to her as an “attorney.” And her public defence helped fuel the perception she was in over her head — trying and failing to control a story that was spiraling.
After a string of surprisingly combative interviews on Fox News — specifically her appearance with Trump’s friend Sean Hannity on Thursday night, when the host grilled her over her legal credentials — the president decided it was untenable for her to remain in the role.
But it wasn’t until Friday morning that he broke the news to her. Even during another appearance on Fox, Zacharia said she believed she retained Trump’s confidence.
“I’m standing here,” she said. On her way back into the White House, she told assembled reporters she was eager to work with them, and encouraged them to seek out her phone number.
Four hours later, Trump emerged from the White House, having just held a frank conversation with his new spokesperson.
“Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” Trump said he told Zacharia on Friday morning.
A source close to the president told CNN he still respects and likes Zacharia as a person, and noted she and her family were having dinner Friday evening with U.S.
Vice-President JD Vance at his residence, evidence she is still well regarded in the White House and the administration.
Still, Trump is again without a top spokesperson in the critical final stretch before Election Day. He offered no indication Friday he had anyone in mind to fill the post.
“A lot of people want the job,” he claimed, as the search begins anew.
Kristen Holmes, Alayna Treene, Kevin Liptak, CNN
