Published: 02:15 BST, 16 October 2026 | Updated: 02:15 BST, 16 October 2026

By any reasonable assessment, President Donald Trump's new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia has gotten off to a rocky start.

The scale of her debut faceplant is now being unfavorably compared to Anthony Scaramucci's 11-day stint as Trump's White House communications director and Geraldo Rivera's opening of Al Capone's vault.

But senior members of President Trump's team tell me that they believe the biggest threat to Zacharia's survival in the job is not her maiden turn at the podium, nor the controversy over her seemingly flagrant misrepresentation of her legal credentials.

Rather, it is the unknowns in her background – a past that appears to have not been thoroughly checked out before she took on Washington's highest profile positions – that are causing the most concern.

Zacharia, a 42-year-old mother of four, arrived at the James S Brady Press Briefing Room podium seeming like a deer that had been assured shortly before encountering headlights that speeding semis are perfectly harmless.

The degree to which she appeared unprepared, perhaps unqualified, to brief the nation on Tuesday morning was immediately apparent to journalists in the room and, I'm told, White House staff watching – through the fingers of hands pressed to faces – behind the scenes.

Her initial outing lasted about 14 minutes, half spent stiltedly reading from a script and the other half spent taking questions from just three reporters. But putting aside her pilloried podium performance for a moment, Zacharia was standing on a tinderbox.

Introduced as 'an attorney' by the President, she was set upon by reporters as she stood behind Trump on their way to boarding Air Force One. Asked where she passed the bar exam, she replied: 'When I moved to China.'

By any reasonable assessment, President Donald Trump's new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia has gotten off to a rocky start