Point Seven Three Scaramuccis

The paper usually runs one of these a day, and it already ran one today. This one could not wait. On Friday The New York Times, citing three people familiar with the matter, reported that the President had fired Katie Zacharia, the White House press secretary. A senior official said she was "transitioning out," into "a new role that would be announced at a later date." Asked on the South Lawn whether he had fired her, the President said, "No no. I want her to have a good life." He also said the media had brutalized her. Anthony Scaramucci, who has held the record for this kind of thing since 2017, posted his response: "Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people's pain."

The paper owes its readers a correction to its own outlook before it says anything else. On Thursday it quoted a White House official warning that she needed "to get much better, fast, otherwise she'll break Scaramucci's record," and it quoted Scaramucci himself: "The clock is running." The paper heard the clock. Then, in its own voice, it predicted that "in a month she will probably be fine at the podium." We saw this day coming. We gave her a month. She did not get a week.

Now the measurement, because the coverage has it wrong. The headlines say she lasted five days, which some outlets have converted to "less than half of one Scaramucci." Five days is her time on the job, from Monday, October 12, when she started, through Friday. But nobody counts Scaramucci that way. He was named communications director on July 21, 2017, and he was out on July 31, after a profane phone call to a New Yorker reporter, before he had formally started. His famous eleven days run from the day he was named to the day he was gone, counting both. Count Zacharia the same way. The President named her on Friday, October 9, and she was out on Friday, October 16. That is eight days. Eight divided by eleven is 0.727. Katie Zacharia lasted 0.73 Scaramuccis. Put the other way, one Scaramucci is 1.375 Zacharias, which nobody is going to say out loud, and that is why the Scaramucci stays the unit. A meter used to be a platinum bar kept outside Paris. The Scaramucci is a man in a good suit, and the standard holds. One adviser said she would be gone "in the next few days," and each extra day would add a little over nine hundredths of a Scaramucci, but the paper stops her clock where his stopped, on the day she was removed, not the day she cleans out her desk. She did not catch him.

So why did she go? No one has given an official reason. Here is what happened in her eight days. Her first briefing, on Tuesday, ran about fourteen minutes, and she took three questions. On her way out, asked where she had passed the bar, she said, "When I moved to China." The State Bar of California says it has no record of her ever being licensed, and The Wall Street Journal reported she took the California bar in 2011 and failed. CNN counted at least fifteen posts in which she called herself an attorney. On Thursday night, on Sean Hannity's show, she admitted she had never passed a bar. "I sat for it," she said, "because I didn't want to have a withdraw status." Of the posts, she said, "I think they were retweets, and I corrected the record." By Friday afternoon she was transitioning.

So the official story, as far as anyone can piece it together, is that she was bad at the job and not who she said she was. The paper would like to take that standard seriously for a minute and apply it to everyone she worked with.

Start with the Secretary of Defense. Pete Hegseth was a weekend co-host on Fox & Friends when he was nominated, and the Senate confirmed him 51 to 50, with the Vice President breaking the tie. In March of last year he posted the timing of strikes on Yemen into a Signal chat that included the editor of The Atlantic. His public answer was "Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that." In December the Pentagon's inspector general found he had sent nonpublic operational information from his personal phone, in a way that could have put pilots in danger. He would not sit for an in-person interview, and he called the report a "total exoneration." It was not. This September, when The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon was undercounting the Americans killed in the Iran war, he called it "a complete lie." Last week the Pentagon raised its count to twenty-one dead. He spoke at the Army's big annual convention on Wednesday. He still has the job.

The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, has said he was "the Main Justice lead prosecutor for Benghazi," and his book says he was "leading the prosecution's efforts." The New York Times found he was a junior Justice Department staff member at the time and not part of the trial team. In other words his résumé has a bar-exam problem of its own, minus the bar exam. On the day Charlie Kirk was shot he announced that "the subject" was in custody, and about ninety minutes later he announced the man had been released. The actual suspect was arrested the next night. He has flown the FBI's jet to State College, Pennsylvania, where his girlfriend sang the national anthem at a wrestling event, and he took a government plane to the Olympics in Milan, where he was filmed chugging a beer in the U.S. hockey team's locker room. He still has the job.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, said early last year that he and the President were "focused on the 10-year Treasury," the interest rate that drives what Americans pay for mortgages. In September the ten-year yield topped five percent, its highest since 2007. Defending the tariffs, he said that "access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream." He owned as much as $25 million of North Dakota farmland, and the Office of Government Ethics wrote that he had "failed to timely comply" with his ethics agreement. He announced that he had sold it in December, days before the administration announced aid for farmers. He still has the job.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., put out a report on children's health last year that cited studies that do not exist. One scientist named as an author of a cited paper said it "is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with." The White House called it "formatting issues." He still has the job. Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, called Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot dead by federal agents in Minneapolis in January, a "domestic terrorist" who "tried to assassinate federal law enforcement." Video showed Pretti holding a phone. Miller then blamed the Department of Homeland Security for the information. He still has the job. Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who created the Signal chat and added the editor of The Atlantic, was moved to ambassador to the United Nations. He has a job too.

That is the bar, and the paper means that word in both senses. In this administration you can lie about war plans, invent a prosecution you were not part of, chase a ten-year yield the wrong way, and cite research that does not exist, and you keep your job. Katie Zacharia called herself a lawyer for years without a license to show for it. On this team that is not a scandal. It is the dress code.

To be fair, not everyone stays. Some people do get fired, and the paper looked at who and why, because that is where her story starts to make sense.

Kristi Noem ran Homeland Security for more than a year. In May of last year a senator asked her to define habeas corpus, and she said it was "a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their rights." It is the opposite. Her purse was stolen in a Washington restaurant while she had a Secret Service detail, with about $3,000 in cash, her passport and her DHS badge in it. Her book claimed she had met Kim Jong Un, which she had not, and described shooting her fourteen-month-old dog, which she had. None of that got her fired. What got her fired was her testimony in March, under oath, that the President had approved a $220 million ad campaign starring Kristi Noem. The President told NBC he "didn't know anything about it." Within days he had named her replacement, Senator Markwayne Mullin. She was given a soft landing, a job as a special envoy, and the State Department said this week that it has expired and she is now a senior adviser there. For about two months, her spokesperson at DHS was Katie Zacharia. She learned from the best. Noem's definition of habeas corpus was that the President gets to suspend it, and in June of last year Zacharia posted three words in reply to Stephen Miller: "Suspend habeas corpus." They were reading from the same page.

Pam Bondi said in February of last year that the Epstein client list was "sitting on my desk right now to review." In July her department said there was no client list. None of that got her fired. She was fired in April, according to reporting at the time, over the Epstein files and over how slowly she was prosecuting the President's enemies. Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate under oath that there were "no classified or intelligence equities" in the Signal chat, and CNN reported that the inspector general's review found some of what was posted matched material classified as secret. That cost her nothing. What got her publicly slapped down was telling Congress that American intelligence did not believe Iran was building a nuclear weapon, which drew the President's verdict: "She's wrong." She left in May, citing her husband's illness, and the paper wishes him well.

Look at that list and the rule is not hard to find. The paper does not believe the President is fooled by any of these people. He can see the incompetence, and he can see the rest of it too. Nobody in this administration loses a job for lying to the public, or for being bad at it, or for being crooked. People lose their jobs when their mess lands on him: when they make him look bad, or make him wrong, or put his name in it. Noem said under oath that he approved her ads, and suddenly he "didn't know anything about it." Bondi did not produce the prosecutions he wanted. Gabbard was never fired for anything, but the one thing that got her a public rebuke was contradicting him on Iran, where she happened to be right.

Now Zacharia. She was hired the way everyone in this building is hired. Politico reported that she checked his schedule and his Truth Social feed every day and booked her TV hits for when she thought he would be watching. She was hired for being on his screen. Then he called her an attorney in his own post announcing her, and the Daily Beast reported he was blindsided to find out she was not one. She made the President wrong on his own feed. Then she went on his favorite show to fix it, and she admitted it to Sean Hannity, and the President's review, according to the Daily Beast, was "Sean was a little bit tough." Hegseth's mistakes happen in Yemen and Iran. Patel's happen on a jet. Bessent's happen in the bond market, which the President does not watch. Hers happened on Fox, at the time he was watching, which is the one thing she was hired to be good at, and the thing she got wrong was his own post. The paper doubts he was shocked that someone he hired was not who she said she was. He hired all of them. What he will not carry is a mistake with his name on it, and when one turns up he does what he did on the South Lawn on Friday: he says he never fired her and wishes her a good life, as if she had been somebody else's hire. Incompetence does not get you fired from this administration, and neither does being crooked. Getting caught where the blame can reach him does, and on your way under the bus he will act as if he barely knew you.

And then there is the man who hired all of them, because the paper has noticed that nobody at the top of this org chart ever has to transition out. The President told the country on election night in 2024, "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars." On February 28 he started one with Iran. At least twenty-one Americans are dead and 865 are wounded, by the Pentagon's own count, after it quietly lowered that count in July and then raised it back. The Pentagon puts the cost at $43.6 billion. Both chambers of Congress voted for him to stop, 215 to 208 and 50 to 48, and a White House official said the votes had "no significance." CNN counted fifty-three times he promised to end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, which he later said he meant "a little bit sarcastic." That war is going into its fifth winter. He said, "When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One." Inflation was 3.7 percent in September, up from 3.0 percent a year earlier.

Then there is the money, which this administration does not hide. By his own financial disclosure, the President took in more than $1.4 billion in crypto-related income in 2025. Abu Dhabi's MGX paid for a $2 billion stake in Binance in his family's stablecoin, and in October of last year he pardoned Binance's founder, Changpeng Zhao, "at the request of a lot of very good people." The family's crypto company says it played no role. He accepted a 747 from Qatar and said it would go "directly to the library after I leave office." His son Eric said in August that this is "not the plan at the moment." He knocked down the East Wing for a ballroom paid for by companies that do business with his government. He has demanded $230 million from his own Justice Department, which is now run by his former criminal defense lawyer. And on credentials, the man who called Katie Zacharia an attorney was found by a New York court to have inflated the value of his own business for years, including listing his Trump Tower apartment at 30,000 square feet. It is 10,996. An appeals court threw out the roughly $500 million penalty last year, and upheld the finding. He paid $25 million to settle the lawsuits over Trump University, which was not a university. If inflating your résumé were a firing offense in this White House, the first one out the door would be the man who signs the paychecks.

So, to the question everyone has been asking all week: why did anyone expect Katie Zacharia to be competent? Nothing about how she was chosen suggested it. Nothing about the people around her required it. The paper has been looking for a single senior official in this administration who is plainly good at the job, plainly who they say they are, and willing to say that any of this is not normal. It is not a long list. What made her different is not that she was worse than the others. It is that the press secretary's failures happen live, on camera, in his own viewing hours, and hers made him look like someone who could be fooled. Everyone else in this building fails where he is not watching, or fails in his favor.

Which brings us to the face at the top of this page. It is not Katie Zacharia. The paper already put her face up this week, and as of Friday afternoon she does not have a job to put it on. It is Anthony Scaramucci, because the unit of measurement gets the face, and because it is his record she did not break. He said he takes no pleasure in other people's pain. The paper takes a little. It also expects the President to name a replacement who will last longer, sound smoother, and say the same things, and that will be worse, and the Scaramucci will still be the unit when that one goes. Five clowns.