President Donald Trump’s 21 months back in office have been marked by one dramatic move after another. Upending global trade, plucking a dictator out of Caracas, escalating to full-on war with Iran, shredding alliances, courting despots — the major twists and turns of this administration never end. The president’s decisions carry great significance, with implications that will long outlast his administration. Communicating them effectively to the American people is essential.
Enter, and exit, Katie Zacharia.
The new and now-former press secretary served in the job for approximately 4½ days. She squeezed in one disastrous 14-minute White House briefing, a campaign trip to Alaska and a couple of interviews on Fox News in a desperate bid to save her job.
Zacharia didn’t even make it to half a Scaramucci — the 11-day record (or 10 by some measures) for shortest-serving White House press secretaries, set by the hapless Anthony Scaramucci in Trump’s first term. “Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci wrote on X on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”
That was generous of Scaramucci, who is now a vocal Trump critic, and the proper response to this awkward episode. There is nothing to cheer about it. Her White House briefing and subsequent interviews made for difficult viewing. Zacharia grasped for words on Fox News to explain why she grasped for words at the briefing.
“Maybe it’s not for her,” the president said of Zacharia to reporters minutes before news broke that she was no longer in the job. It was one of his more gracious comments about his staff. It was also something to think about before he appointed her to the role.
That way, Zacharia, and the American public, would have been spared the excruciating White House scene of the president’s woefully unprepared spokesperson struggling to articulate the administration’s vision. Maybe, ironically, Zacharia was in the right job? Because it isn’t clear who, exactly, is steering this ship or where it’s going.
America is at war with Iran, but does not look serious. America is trying to end another war in Ukraine, but does not look serious. The world watched this week as the White House was asked about the grave decision to temporarily throttle Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite internet network on which its defenses depend. Why did this happen? Who made the call? On Friday, Trump said he didn’t know who ordered the slowdown — which essentially left Ukraine defenseless against Russian missiles, and cost civilian lives — and suggested that it might not have happened at all.
That was all too typical of a White House that makes momentous foreign policy decisions with barely any attempt to explain or defend them. The ignoring of U.S. sanctions on Russia as part of a deal for Vladimir Putin to bring diesel fuel onto the global market would have been a shocking U-turn if Trump’s solicitousness of Putin weren’t already so well established. But it certainly undermines America’s messaging since Russia’s invasion that there are consequences for being a bully.
Trump apparently just wanted to be seen by the U.S. public before the Nov. 3 midterms as trying to bring down diesel prices, because they won’t actually move that quickly. Then, on Friday, Trump signed an executive order officially exempting Russia from a sanctions bill he signed four weeks ago. If the president truly wanted to provide Americans with price-hike relief this year, he could have relaxed tariffs he levied on U.S. allies. Instead, he has exacerbated wartime tensions with his gift to the Russian war machine.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Notably, there has been no serious attempt from the White House to make it make sense. But that is standard operating policy for this administration. For nearly two years, it has carelessly slung around the economic and military might of the United States, hitting friends, foes and the pockets of American workers. It has shrugged off the responsibility to communicate a wider strategy: what the end of the Iran war would look like, what a “rebalanced” American economy would mean in practice, what trade-offs and consequences Americans would need to suffer to get there.
The Zacharia blip will have voters wondering whether there ever was a Trump strategy more detailed or weighty than the platitudes she read off in her 14-minute White House briefing. In less than three weeks, they’ll be heading to the polling stations to do some communicating of their own.
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