White House press secretary’s task becoming impossible

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Katie Zacharia did not make a successful debut as White House press secretary. Standing for the first time at the briefing room podium, she stumbled.It’s true that she made real news by announcing that President Donald Trump had demanded the resignation of the scandal-plagued U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle. But the press secretary herself became the story of the day by provoking questions such as: Can she cope, will she last (the betting markets say no), is she actually a qualified lawyer, and was she even vetted?It was, in short, a nightmare start. One would normally think that if her tenure continues into next year, she’d get the hang of it and find it easier. But that assumption is probably wide of the mark. The job is bound to get harder, not easier, because, whatever her innate skills, the man on whose behalf she must speak is becoming glaringly indefensible. White House press secretary Katie Zacharia speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Oct. 13, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson) The horrors Trump has recently perpetrated make hardened observers cringe as perhaps never before. His conduct, ranging from tasteless buffoonery on trivial matters to outrages on moral and strategic issues of global importance, is such that even a preternaturally capable press secretary would fail to present them in a good light.Start with the tasteless and trivial. Did you see Trump’s fake video of facing a tiger? His inspiration was news of a mentally ill Englishman mauled to death after he clambered into a great cat enclosure at a wildlife park. Trump’s post shows the president seated on grass like the victim, but jumping up, chasing the tiger, and wrestling it to the ground. Accompanied by jolly music from “Swinging Safari,” the clip ends with America’s chief executive hugging the tiger in a smiling, furry embrace. It is disgustingly tasteless and, as Washington Examiner columnist Daniel Hannan observed, “the narcissism is off the scale.”No less tasteless but far more important was Trump’s apparent decision to cut Ukraine’s supply of Starlink’s Starshield data, which the beleaguered democracy uses to counter murderous Russian missile and drone attacks. The stanching of data speeds coincided with Trump trying to foist Russia-favoring peace terms on Ukraine. Elon Musk, Starlink’s owner, deflected blame, saying Starshield systems are “controlled by the U.S. government [and] any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately POTUS.”It is impossible not to suspect that Trump wants to extort compliance from Ukraine, a tactic that betrays America’s strategic and moral duty to stand for freedom and democracy against imperial aggression, especially when the aggression comes from a nation that is also America’s enemy, as Russia is.The president is desperate for favorable opinion polls before November’s midterm congressional election, and is behaving increasingly erratically to achieve that unlikely end.THE GOP’S NOT-SO-GREAT COMMUNICATORSWhen, as seems likely, Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate are washed away next month, and when, shortly thereafter, candidates emerge to run to replace Trump as president in 2029, the current Oval Office occupant can be expected to sink even deeper into lame duck self-absorption at the expense of national honor and interest.The White House press secretary, no matter who it is, will have a nearly impossible task trying to make his or her boss look good.