Just before the FtB site went down, I had prepared a post about the spectacular flameout of Trump’s latest press secretary Katie Zacharia, whose tenure broke the record set by Anthony Scaramucci (11 days) and British prime minister Liz Truss (47 days), so I decided to post it anyway.

She lasted just a week, her appointment announced on Friday, October 9, took office on the following Monday, had a disastrous first press conference on Tuesday, and got fired on Friday the 16th.

Her ouster came despite a full-throated, reality-free defense of her inaugural press briefing by the White House website.

Today, Katie Zacharia delivered a commanding inaugural press briefing as the 37th White House Press Secretary. The briefing, which generated wall-to-wall coverage, served as a strong introduction to her tenure and highlighted the Trump Administration’s record of delivering historic successes for the American people.

The pugnacious communications director Steven Cheung also praised her to the skies.

Reached for comment, the White House referred to a post from White House communications director Steven Cheung, who criticized a different group that asked the State Bar of California to investigate Zacharia. In that post, Cheung referred to the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability as “a radical leftist-organization run by rabid numbskulls suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Cheung also said in a statement that Zacharia “is a fabulous and wonderful addition to the team.”

“She is uniquely qualified and whip smart to help inform the American people about all the great things President Trump and his Administration have been doing, and she will do an incredible job as Press Secretary,” he said.

Schadenfreude is a mixed pleasure since it involves someone’s downfall. But in this case, it is unmixed since Zacharia displayed a willingness to do and say anything to attract Trump’s attention and curry favor with him.

Zacharia lived by the sword and died in the one arena that Donald Trump truly cares about: television.

She reportedly got the job by closely monitoring the US president’s public schedule and tracked his active hours on Truth Social to predict exactly when he would be watching TV. She then timed her own appearances on air to make sure she caught his eye. The fact that she fitted the glossy blond aesthetic from what Trump calls “central casting” also helped.

She was really awful willing to tear people down with lies to serve Trump.

The cynical might glance at Zacharia and remark upon her outward similarity to others in the Trump circle, including Natalie Harp, the aide known in the White House as “the human printer,” and two previous press secretaries, Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt. But that would be wrong. She did bring to the job a certain conspiratorial frame of mind. Several years ago, seemingly under the influence of the now largely forgotten Pizzagate scandal, she called John Podesta, the former Clinton and Obama Administration adviser, a pedophile. (This was both false and unkind.) Working the same set of obsessions, she has written that “the radical left Hollywood elitists are sick pedo cannibals.” (Ditto.) Zacharia has also shared phony medical information, including this: “8 in 10 women had a miscarriage after getting the COVID vaccine.”

So who will replace the Zacbbot? The world of Trump and Fox News has a deep bench of blond young women who are willing to fawn obsequiously over Trump and lie brazenly on his behalf so it should not be had to find the next person.

Also lost in the noise over her ouster was that Kimberly Guilfoyle got fired as ambassador to Greece for doing the kind of grifting of asking for money to give favors that the Trump family routinely does, and another Trump crony Paolo Zampolli, who claimed that he was the person who introduced Trump to his current wife, was also fired from a job at the state department because he seemed to think that his proximity to the Trumps allowed him to override his superiors and act like a freelance ambassador.

Seth Meyers was off last week and on his return yesterday he was incredulous that he had missed the entire Zacharia tenure as press secretary.