After Karoline Leavitt formally stepped down as White House press secretary, Donald Trump took quite a while before settling on her successor. In fact, the president went longer without a press secretary than any of his modern predecessors.
Last week, however, he finally announced his choice: Conservative commentator Katie Zacharia would take the reins, following a brief stint working with then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this year. A couple of days later, the president said on his social media platform that Zacharia’s first day at the White House podium would be Tuesday, Oct. 13.
But before Zacharia’s first briefing gets underway, it’s worth appreciating why she’s beginning her tenure with a credibility deficit that typical White House press secretaries haven’t had to deal with. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski reported:
President Donald Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, repeatedly made baseless accusations of pedophilia against prominent Democrats and shared conspiracy-related content, including claims that echoed the debunked “Pizzagate” theory and that Hollywood elites were pedophilic cannibals, according to a CNN KFile review of her social media posts.
The posts, many from 2022, reveal a history of inflammatory rhetoric and conspiracy-related content from a woman now poised to become one of the administration’s most visible spokespeople.
The report, which has not been independently verified by MS NOW, added that Zacharia “also promoted on Truth Social a repost that claimed that comedian Joan Rivers died mysteriously after saying that former President Barack Obama was gay and that former first lady Michelle Obama had a penis.”
In a separate instance, the new White House press secretary, sounding very much like a QAnon adherent, wrote online, “The radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals. Change my mind.”
Given that Zacharia has worked as a conservative commentator and made frequent appearances on outlets such as Fox News, it stands to reason that she would have embraced a variety of partisan conspiracy theories. But there’s a qualitative difference between run-of-the-mill conservative nonsense and the kind of fringe absurdities that clearly position Zacharia far from anything resembling the American mainstream.
When CNN offered the White House an opportunity to comment, a spokesperson did not respond to her inflammatory record, saying only that Team Trump was confident that Zacharia would “do an incredible job.”
Perhaps, though her ugly record trails behind her like cans tied to a bumper. Indeed, The Bulwark did a similar dive into her social media history, much of which was deleted shortly before she was hired to be the chief spokesperson for the incumbent president, and the outlet found Zacharia pushing all kinds of bizarre ideas related to Trump’s 2020 election defeat, federal takeovers of states she doesn’t like and Covid vaccines. The report added, “And in a podcast interview last year she insisted that the abortion pill mifepristone was the same chemical used in Nazi Germany extermination camps. It’s not.”
What’s more, while Zacharia has routinely presented herself to the public as a lawyer, Popular Information’s Judd Legum could find no evidence that she had ever been licensed to practice law, and when offered an opportunity to prove otherwise, the White House referred to a Trump social media item in which the president asserted that she was an attorney.
It’s possible that the White House hired Zacharia because it didn’t know about her crackpot social media history. It’s also possible that Team Trump knew about her tweets and decided not to care. But the most unsettling possibility is that Team Trump hired her because of her radicalism.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
