Poor Donald Trump. His (third) wife seemingly can’t bear to be near him and his (fifth) press secretary recently abandoned him to be with a baby she had only recently met.
“She decided she loved her children more than she loved Donald Trump,” the president lamented in August when Karoline Leavitt decided to step down a few months after giving birth. “I’m very upset about this. She has to go home and spend time with her children. That does happen on occasion with some people – when they love their children.”
Apparently, Leavitt loves her children and Fox News, because, in a highly predictable turn of events, the 29-year-old has got a gig there now . But don’t worry too much about the president: he’s found himself a new woman to attack the press and act as his mouthpiece. On Friday, Trump announced that he’d appointed Katie Zacharia , previously a communications adviser for the Trump Media and Technology Group, as the new press secretary. Unlike some of Trump’s other lackeys, Zacharia has government experience: she was once a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson. Her most important qualification, however, is her fealty to King Trump. “She has an unblemished record of support,” Trump said in his announcement. “She is … a devoted fan and member of Maga!”
While you’ve obviously got to worship the president to get a top comms role with him, there are a few other job requirements. Not least a willingness to embrace what former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway called “ alternative facts ”. Zacharia gets full marks in that department. Last year the press secretary, who once worked for an anti-abortion advocacy group , claimed on X that the abortion medication mifepristone “is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps”. While there is a tenuous corporate connection which conspiracy theorists have tried to play up, mifepristone was developed in the 1980s by a French company.
The origins of mifepristone aren’t the only alternative facts Zacharia is fond of. She has echoed Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was “ stolen ” and used her Truth Social account to promote the QAnon conspiracy theory , which posits that Trump is saving the world from a cabal of satanic paedophiles. She’s also promoted Pizzagate, the baseless theory that Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign chief, John Podesta, were operating an underground child sex-trafficking ring from a Washington DC pizza shop.
While Zacharia scores highly when it comes to devotion and unhinged theories, I suspect that she’s going to need to ramp up her public hatred of Joe Biden if she wants to stay on her boss’s good side. Biden is dealing with stage four cancer and mostly staying out of the public eye, but Trump still acts as if he’s running against the man. According to a recent Reuters analysis , Trump has invoked Biden’s name about 900 times this year. And not in a pleasant way.
Beni Rae Harmony, 24, who is Trump’s new assistant press secretary, seems to suffer from the same Biden Derangement Syndrome afflicting the president; indeed, it might be part of the reason she got the job. A Christmas 2021 photo of Harmony wearing a “Fuck Joe Biden” T-shirt while holding a rifle recently did the rounds online. The White House subsequently defended Harmony , calling her “a trusted voice for the Maga movement”.
Beyond bashing Biden, another helpful quality for a Trump spokesperson is a fondness for insults. White House communications director, Steven Cheung, whom Trump reportedly refers to as “my sumo wrestler” probably leads the pack there. He’s forged a shock-jock style comms strategy and endeavours to be as crass as possible. Cheung has told the former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to “shut his stupid mouth”, labelled senator Jon Ossoff “the biggest cuck loser in politics”, and described the former FBI head, James Comey, as “one of the dumbest motherfuckers in human history”. He’s also fond of calling people “retards”, recently directing the slur at CNN host Erin Burnett .
Cheung’s rhetoric would get a lot of ordinary people fired. But it has made him a fixture in Trumpworld: he’s been with the president in various capacities for a decade now . That’s rare for Trump, who cycles through staff . If Zacharia lasts even a year in her new role, meanwhile, I’ll be surprised. With a (very likely) disastrous midterm election approaching, she has her work cut out and will need all the alternative facts she can find. Zacharia has also admitted that she is probably not even the best person for the job. “President Trump does not need a spokesperson,” Zacharia gushed on X last month. “He is his own best Press Secretary.”
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
