Bringing new meaning to the “Press BRIEFing”, Katie Zacharia was at the podium for 13 minutes, five minutes of which was spent taking seven questions from a MAGA blogger and two pro-Trump TV reporters
If you’d gone to put the kettle on when she took to the podium, you’d have missed the whole thing(Image: Samuel Corum/UPI/Shutterstock)
The first press briefing by Katie Zacharia, Donald Trump’s new Press Secretary was, at least, mercifully brief.
It lasted 13 minutes. She spent 5 minutes and 15 seconds of which taking seven questions from one MAGA blogger and two pro-Trump TV reporters. Then she was gone.
In less than the time it takes to microwave a jacket potato, the replacement for departed propagandist-in-chief Karoline Leavitt managed to shower the President with praise, take a handful of softball questions, swerve one proper question entirely and accidentally refer to her husband as “her President”, before abruptly ending the shortest ever briefing and scurrying away.
Zacharia took to the podium for her highly anticipated debut and immediately gushed about how she’s always wanted to work for Trump.
To see more of the stories you love from The Mirror and to find them easily in Google then make us your preferred source. Free and easy-to-do, just click on the link here to find more from The Mirror at the top of your feed.
She then read out a relatively lengthy monologue from notes about how great the President is, her eyes determinedly staring at the paper in front of her, with all the confidence, charisma and pizazz of a new starter at a call centre reading out the Direct Debit Guarantee for the first time.
Not only is he just incredibly awesome, she indicated, he’s also energetic – reeling off a string of states he’s planning to visit over the next week to hold rallies ahead of the Midterms, many of them in states like Alaska and Arizona where Republicans should be winning, but aren’t.
She told her first lie from the podium within a couple of minutes, insisting attendance at Trump’s rallies is “at record highs, as enthusiastic hardworking Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump and Republicans” – despite photographs of empty seats at his rallies being all over social media every single night. It was almost as if someone had nudged her before she walked in and said: “Make sure you tell them how big my crowds are”.
When it was time to take questions, she turned to the “new media seat”, introduced by Leavitt as a brazen ploy to dilute the actual reporters in the press room with giddy propagandists and performing MAGA monkeys and tasked with tossing up softball questions for the Press Secretary to kill time with while still claiming to offer “transparency.” No self-respecting journalist would sit in that chair if it was pulled out for them.
Today it was the turn of far-right blog Breitbart, whose representative who asked a nice easy one about whether she would be keeping the new media seat, and another one about whether Trump will be continuing to campaign energetically before the midterms.
Then she turned to the room – starting with Fox News’ Peter Doocey, who asked whether she would be a credible source of information or another lying mouthpiece. I mean, he said it nicer than that. But her answer was no more reassuring, saying she was there to tell everyone about Trump’s “incredible wins.”
After swerving a follow-up from Doocey about whether the US has stopped sharing intel with Ukraine, she turned to NewsNation’s Elina Shirazi – whose question elicited both actual news and Zacharia’s first excruciating gaffe.
The news was the inevitable resignation of Kimberly Guilfoyle, the US ambassador to Greece and Donald Trump Jr’s ex-girlfriend, who allegedly asked a Trump donor to pay off her $100,000 American Express bill.
The gaffe was when, answering a follow-up about her family she mistakenly referred to her husband as “my President.”
In a brief moment of self-awareness, she mumbled: “That’s a good one…”
And that was it. After gushing about her predecessor Karoline Leavitt in response to one more follow-up from Shirazi, she told the pack that it was all over, and that any further questions should be put to Trump himself before he gets on his chopper to head to Alaska for a rally.
You have to wonder why so many members of the White House Press Corps continue to turn up to this increasingly pointless pantomime.
