Smells Like Trump Spirit

Yesterday this paper promised to come back to Katie Zacharia's first briefing. Here it is. On Tuesday the new White House press secretary walked into the Brady Briefing Room four days after the President named her to replace Karoline Leavitt. She opened with "I am so honored to work for President Trump and the American people," and Poynter's account of the rest was that she spent most of it "looking down" and "reading prepared notes." She took questions from three reporters, from Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail, and left after about fourteen minutes. A White House official told CNN it was "brutal." Another told Poynter there was "literally zero reason to put her out on her second day, unprepared." A third told MS NOW, "She needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she'll break Scaramucci's record," and Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted eleven days as communications director in 2017, posted: "The clock is running." The President's review was the only good one she got: "I thought she did very good."

The coverage since has treated this as though nobody in a newsroom has ever had a bad first day. Most people have had one. Reading from your notes and calling on friendly faces is what a nervous person does, and it may be all this was. In a month she will probably be fine at the podium. The paper wants to be clear about what "fine" means in this job, though. Her predecessor was fluent and poised, and she delivered the verifiably true and the verifiably false in exactly the same voice, with the same confidence and no tell. That is more dangerous than lying badly, because the listener has nothing to go on. Zacharia described the job on Tuesday as amplifying the President, and she will get better at it. The first day is probably the worst day she will have at the podium. It is not the worst day the country will have because of her.

And if it was not just nerves, if she simply cannot do the job, she will fit right in, and the paper says this with real gratitude: thank God. Congress has stopped checking the executive branch. The courts mostly defer to it. What has slowed the slide toward authoritarianism, which a lot of us once assumed could not happen here, is mostly the administration getting in its own way. This week a super PAC backing Susan Collins in Maine admitted that its vendor had spent about $25,000 putting an attack ad against her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, into the Portland, Oregon market. Google's ad data showed it was seen more than a million times by Oregonians, who cannot vote in Maine. In March of last year the national security adviser added the editor of The Atlantic to a Signal group chat, and the Secretary of Defense posted the timing of strikes on Yemen into it. That April, on the day the President called Liberation Day, his tariff list included the Heard and McDonald Islands, which have no people living on them, only penguins and seals. The penguins have not cut a deal. If this party had a theme song, it would be "I feel corrupt and stupid. Smells like Trump spirit." The stupid half of that has done more to protect the republic than the Senate has.

So the briefing is the least interesting thing about her. The interesting part is what happened outside on the way out. Reporters asked where she had passed the bar, because she has described herself as a lawyer on Fox News and on social media for years, and the President introduced her as one. She answered, "When I moved to China." She went to China after Pepperdine's law school in 2011, when her husband took a private equity job there, and her LinkedIn says she was an associate at Zhong Lun, a Beijing firm, until 2013. China does not let foreigners sit for its bar exam. Foreign lawyers at Chinese firms may advise only on the law of places where they are licensed, and nobody has found anywhere she was licensed. The State Bar of California told Newsweek it has no record of her. The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported that she took the California bar in 2011 and failed. She later told the New York Times she had misheard the question over the noise of Marine One. Her emailed statement says she "practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials," and does not say what those credentials were. On Wednesday the Campaign for Accountability asked the California bar to investigate, because in California calling yourself a lawyer without a license is a crime. The White House called the group "rabid numbskulls." That is a lot of noise from one helicopter.

Then there is how she got the job. Politico reported, citing a person familiar with her approach, that she checked the President's public schedule and his Truth Social feed every day and timed her TV appearances to moments she thought he would be watching. It worked. Most cable bookers would call that a career strategy. It is also an exact description of what this administration hires for. You do not need to know anything. You need to be on the screen when he looks up.

What she was saying on those screens, and posting the rest of the time, is the record she brings to the podium. CNN's KFile went through her old posts. In September 2022 she wrote "Pedo Podesta. #pedoPodesta" about John Podesta, who has never been charged with anything, and she shared Pizzagate material and other claims that Democrats and Hollywood figures run a child-sex ring. The Bulwark recovered posts she has since deleted. In one she reposted a claim that "8 in 10 women" had miscarried after the COVID vaccine, which is not true. In another she wrote that the federal government should take over California. In June 2025 Stephen Miller called sanctuary cities a criminal conspiracy, and the woman who now speaks for the President replied with three words: "Suspend habeas corpus." The Constitution gives that power to Congress, and only during rebellion or invasion. In November 2025 she wrote that mifepristone "is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps." That is a smear about a drug millions of women have used, built on the Holocaust.

About Russia, the paper will say exactly what is on the record and no more. Weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, she reshared a Truth Social post that said "Putin is at war with the CABAL – and the Ukraine is in bed with them," with pictures of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and George Soros. Nobody has reported any business, money or contact between her and Russia, and this paper is not implying any. Her Russia connection is the same as a lot of the President's supporters' in 2022: while Russian artillery was shelling Kharkiv, she looked at the war and decided Ukraine was the bad guy, because the people she hated at home were on Ukraine's side. She has not explained that post. Nobody at Tuesday's briefing got the chance to ask.

So this is the new press secretary. She calls herself a lawyer without a license to show for it, she treats QAnon as news, and she wants habeas corpus suspended. She got the job by timing her TV hits to his viewing schedule, and her first day went badly. On Tuesday she read the page. Whatever was on it came out in the same flat voice, eyes down, the true and the false together, and she did not look up to check which was which. That is the job description, and in a month she will do it with her chin up and nobody will notice the paper. When she does look up and speak for herself, the record above is what comes out. The paper hopes she stays bad at the podium. For now it is the only thing keeping that record from sounding convincing. Five clowns.