Minutes after the White House's new spokesperson, Katie Zacharia, finished her first press briefing last Monday, the internet was flooded with mentions of Anthony Scaramucci. In 2017, Donald Trump chose him as communications director, but he lasted only 10 days in the role after a series of inexplicable errors, including an interview where he criticized government members thinking it was off the record. Since then, Scaramucci himself, now a fierce critic of Trump, has turned the comparison to short-lived appointees into a recurring joke. Following Zacharia's disastrous start, hesitant, very nervous, stumbling through a paper, confusing the president with her husband, and cutting short after a few minutes, online bets pointed to the commentator breaking the record for shortest tenure.
Since then, everything has gone downhill. The media delved into her credentials and found that she has been presenting herself as a lawyer for 15 years, despite not being one. She studied law, graduated, but never passed the bar exam. The issue is not so much her CV, but that she has exposed the president, who came out to defend her from criticism, thinking she was actually a lawyer.
Her poor debut, in a week when newspapers are full of stories about division in the administration, fights among top officials, ambassador dismissals, and even speculation about the possible resignation or dismissal of chief of staff Susie Willies, was the final blow. "Maybe this isn't for her," President Trump said this Friday before boarding a helicopter, suggesting that they have already found her a new job in the administration with less exposure.
"We really like her, she has done a fantastic job... Katie has been treated very badly by the media. Very, very badly. Very unfair. I asked her, 'Is this for you?' And she is a good person. I'm going to let her make that decision. Sean Hannity was a bit tough. Katie has had a rough start, the news has been very unpleasant for her. I told her, 'Honestly, if I were you, I would reconsider,'" Trump said. Denying that it is a dismissal and indicating that he will talk to her when he returns from the trip, but sounding quite convinced. Media outlets like The New York Times already consider her dismissed.
"I told Katie that, in my opinion, the media treated her very unfairly. Let's call it fake news. 'I told her: 'Katie, do you need this? I don't think you need it.' We are talking about doing something. I want her to have a good life. The media is mistreating her," he added.
A bad debut, an even worse story
Having nerves on the first day of work is understandable. The problem is that the spokesperson has a more than controversial history, especially on her social media, where she has repeatedly attacked Trump's enemies and even criticized the administration for being too soft on immigration issues or the Epstein case. "Radical leftist elitists from Hollywood are sick cannibalistic pedophiles. Make them change their minds," she wrote in the past. Along with many references to the so-called Pizzagate, another outlandish theory according to which top Democratic officials, including Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, John Podesta, ran a child sexual abuse ring from the basement of a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong. That basement does not exist, but a man ended up going there to try to rescue children and opened fire with an assault rifle. "Fox should do a report on how much of a pedophile Podesta is," she wrote in 2022, spreading a message from conservative Andrew Breitbart.
This Thursday, amid criticism, global mockery, and bets on how long she would last in the role, Zacharia appeared on Jack Posobiec's channel, another well-known MAGA activist and influencer, who was precisely one of the biggest amplifiers of that dangerous Pizzagate theory a decade ago. And she did so to defend herself against comments about her abilities, but especially to try to put an end to a controversy very much to Washington's liking: her credentials.
In recent years, Zacharia has presented herself and has allowed herself to be presented as a lawyer time and time again. About 20 times in recent months alone on Fox News appearances and dozens more on podcasts. President Trump himself referred to her as a lawyer. The problem is that in the US, to be a lawyer, you have to pass a state exam after finishing law school, known as the BAR, and she never did. That did not stop her from using ambiguous terms on her CV or on LinkedIn, where she presented herself as a "general counsel," which can be translated as general counsel, but in the Anglo-Saxon business world specifically refers to the legal head.
This week, when doubts arose about whether she was a lawyer, the press asked Trump himself, in the White House garden, when his chosen one had passed that exam. He passed the word to Zacharia, who was a few meters away, and she replied that it was more or less when she went to China. She did not say she had done it in China, as many people understood or wanted to understand. She just said it was around that time.
After several days of investigation, WSJ found out that the spokesperson took the exam in 2011 in California, before actually going to work with a Chinese law firm in Beijing. But she failed. On Posobiec's program, Zacharia tried to downplay the issue by saying that she took the exam but was distracted and had a lot on her mind because she had just gotten engaged, and she never worried about the result "because, after all, she knew she wouldn't need it in China," she said. Later, on Fox News, host Sean Hannity asked her, "You took the bar exam, but you didn't pass the bar exam, right?" "Yes," she replied.
As she explained, a president of Pepperdine University, where she studied, had told her that she could identify herself as a lawyer on television. "I consulted with many people in the field for a long time, and they told me that it was absolutely acceptable to call myself a lawyer," she said in the interview, appealing to the difference between two words in English that refer to lawyers: lawyers and attorneys.
The explanation is so absurd that even one of Fox's star presenters, a personal friend of Trump, Sean Hannity, embarrassed her last night for it. After appearing on her friend's channel, the outgoing spokesperson went to Hannity, who treated her with unusual harshness. The president echoed this today.
Actually, everything is circular, and the revolving doors never close in the political world. Two weeks ago, the White House hired Beni Rae Harmony as the new press assistant. She had been a correspondent for Real America's Voice, a media outlet created by Steve Bannon, and in 2021 posed for a Christmas photo wearing a shirt that said "Screw Joe Biden" and holding a rifle. And where had she worked before? As a producer for the aforementioned Jack Posobiec and his Turning Point USA. Or as a press assistant for former congressman Matt Gaetz, who was Trump's first nominee for attorney general, so controversial that Republican senators forced his withdrawal and who was accused, this time in a civil lawsuit, of human trafficking.
The spokesperson's history does not seem to be a problem for the White House. In the past, all such appointments were subjected to brutal scrutiny by the president's team and the secret services, precisely looking for possible dormant scandals. For example, that her husband, Tyler Zacharia, now an executive in the film and entertainment sector, worked for years for Schulze Global Investments, based in Beijing, and helped the company "assemble teams" in North Korea. Or he made loans to Pyongyang.
"Has an impeccable record of support"
Not anymore. Zacharia is a total Trump enthusiast, a defender of the stolen election narrative and that Democrats and the left are evil. And that is enough, as long as she does not make the leader appear weak or foolish. Conspiracies, lizard people, are more of an asset than a liability in the MAGA world. "She has an impeccable record of support. She is... a fanatic and devoted member of MAGA!" the president said when announcing her appointment. The White House Communications Director reacted in the same vein, defending her. Trump, by the way, in the past mocked Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton several times for failing that same exam, although they eventually passed it.
His constant online commentary—especially on the platform Truth Social, where he worked until recently—is highly aggressive. Last year, for instance, he claimed that the abortion drug mifepristone "is linked to the manufacturer of the lethal gas Zyklon B, used in the concentration camps of the Second World War." He also spread stories alleging that Barack Obama's wife actually has a penis, and that individuals who criticized the former president died under suspicious circumstances. In 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he reposted messages defending Vladimir Putin, portraying him as a hero fighting against a "globalist" organization that supposedly included the Clintons and George Soros.
Until this year, Zacharia served on the board of the White Rose Resistance (WRR), an anti-abortion group notorious for its highly aggressive campaigns and harassment targeting clinics. Its founder and leader, Seth Gruber, maintains that women who undergo abortions should be executed "in public," and that those who defend abortion rights should be barred from holding public office—arguing that abortion entails "demonic pagan rituals."
Delusional Conspiracies
On November 15, 2022, at his Mar-a-Lago estate—just one week after the midterm legislative elections—Donald Trump announced his third presidential bid for 2024. By then, it came as no surprise, yet there was significant interest in his remarks, coming two years after his electoral defeat and the assault on the Capitol by his supporters. Among his followers, however, some focused on something else entirely: not his language, his gestures, or his message, but the fact that, on two or three occasions, he took a drink from a water bottle. It is common for a politician to wet their throat—especially during a tense moment—but anyone who has followed Trump closely over the last decade knows that, even now at age 80, he typically delivers speeches lasting one or two hours without any interruptions, drinks, or pauses.
"Has anyone else noticed that Trump drank from his bottle during the announcement? He did it at least two or three times, and I've never seen him do that during speeches or rallies," a user commented on Twitter the following night. So far, nothing unusual. However, the anonymous user continued: "That reminds me of Q posts 765, 767, and 847. Or perhaps it was a signal for something else. By land or by sea," the message concluded. "I was wondering the same thing," replied another user named Katie Zacharia.
The numbers and the letter refer to QAnon, an extraordinary conspiracy theory that emerged in 2017 on the 4chan forum. It posits that a secret network of elites—comprising Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and major financial figures—controls the world, engages in child trafficking, and performs quasi-satanic rituals. According to the theory, Donald Trump was set to wage a secret war to dismantle this network and bring all its members to justice in a final reckoning known as "the Storm." Its origins lie in "Q posts"—anonymous, cryptic messages shared by someone claiming to be "Q," allegedly a high-ranking official with a "Q" security clearance from the Department of Energy and access to classified information. These posts, which were numbered and referred to as "breadcrumbs," contained a mix of open-ended questions, insinuations, fragmented phrases, and supposed clues that followers would interpret and piece together. Naturally, none of these predictions ever came true, yet the movement spread across social media and continues to exert influence on American politics.
The fact that an anonymous individual might see "clues" in a water bottle is entirely in keeping with the nature of this conspiracy theory. The issue today—four years later—is that the person who responded, Katie Zacharia, served (from earlier this week until this Friday) as Trump's new press secretary and spokesperson. She is an enthusiast who went viral for a disastrous first day on the job, during which she appeared visibly nervous and stumbled through her notes in front of cameras from around the world, in what was perhaps the shortest White House press briefing on record.