Marine One was already running on the South Lawn when Donald Trump stopped to take questions on Friday, and the first thing he wanted to talk about was how badly Katie Zacharia had been treated.
“I said to Katie just two minutes ago, I said, Katie, you know, you don’t have to do this,” he said. “The news has been so nasty to her. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I said, I said to her honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider. You think about it, but I wouldn’t reconsider. She’s got a beautiful husband and family. Maybe it’s not for her.”
He was still talking about wanting her to “have a good life” when the helicopter lifted off for a rally in Georgia. A White House official confirmed a few minutes later that she was out. She had only been press secretary since Monday.
Nobody keeps an official list of the shortest tenures in that job, but the record-holder until now has been Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 11 days as communications director in 2017. Zacharia got to five, and unlike Scaramucci she managed it without calling a reporter to curse out her colleagues. Scaramucci noted the change of hands on X on Friday afternoon. “Records are made to be broken,” he wrote. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”
Zacharia will remain a punchline in American political discourse because of the speed with which was sacked. But it was her hiring in the first place that could mark a troubling turning point in Trump’s second term.
According to insiders who spoke to The Independent, Trump offered Zacharia the job without telling chief of staff Susie Wiles, who had been working for weeks on getting Scott Jennings, the CNN commentator who has spent two years defending Trump on a network that does not like him, to give up his lucrative TV contract and be Karoline Leavitt’s polished successor.
But Trump has been chafing in recent weeks at the few strictures Wiles’ White House leadership has put on him as he has grown increasingly frustrated at the lack of high-profile surrogates defending him on television.
So he reached out through that television to bring on one of the few surrogates he saw — right out of central casting, as he likes to say — and she said yes.
He appears to have forgotten that that is how he hired a great many people between 2017 and 2021 and how a great many of them ended up gone within months.
Wiles has managed to spend much of the last two years — the longest tenured chief oif staff he has had — standing between the president and that impulse, and while the administration has shed cabinet secretaries and ambassadors, the West Wing itself has not been beset by leaks and internal feuds the way it had been under any of her predecessors.
Or at least it was until now.
Once it got out that Trump had gone around Wiles, the talk inside the building turned to whether she was leaving, which set the president off and set the staff to jockeying.
Anyone who sat through 2017 and 2018 knows where that leads. Wiles has avoided it for nearly two years by being the one person Trump does not go around. This week he went around her, and the result lasted five days.
Read MoreTrump plans more deals with Putin as Zelensky hails ‘real leaders’ backing Kyiv: Live
Trump declines to blame Putin for Ukraine war, amid transatlantic tensions
Katie Zacharia mercilessly mocked online or only lasting a week with Trump
Presidential adviser says Ukraine is in talks to lift speed limit on military satellite network
Trump admits mistake and fires Katie Zacharia after less than one disastrous week
Kimberly Guilfoyle shared NSFW pics with Fox News colleagues: host