Susie Wiles failed the president in the Katie Zacharia debacle
By Daniel Okafor · Reporting from New York ·
Susie Wiles allowed an unvetted press secretary into the White House and then engineered her exit, proving the Chief of Staff cannot control the president's impulses.
Katie Zacharia is out of the White House. The failure belongs to Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. A chief of staff exists to protect the president from his own impulses. Wiles did not.
Who is Katie Zacharia?
NRK said Zacharia served as press secretary for five days. Her first press conference went viral. The footage showed a "fumbling and nervous reading" of the text. Zacharia held a single 15-minute press briefing on October 13. On Thursday, she admitted she has not passed the bar exam. She had called herself a lawyer in several contexts. PBS said Zacharia did not help herself when questions about her credentials arose. The record shows she worked as an affiliate marketer for Beachbody. She shared QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories on social media.
The sanctioned hit
Politico said Wiles helped arrange Zacharia's appearance on Fox News. Sean Hannity hosted the interview. Zacharia was ousted on Friday, hours after the segment. An anonymous source called the appearance a "sanctioned hit." Wiles did not prefer Zacharia for the role. Instead of blocking the appointment, Wiles watched it happen and then helped pull the trigger.
Impulse beats the chief of staff
This failure follows a pattern. The 2019-2020 White House Chief of Staff tenure of Mick Huckabee shared the same mechanism. Both chiefs of staff faced the tension between their duty to vet candidates and the president's impulsive hiring. The firing of Sean Spicer showed that a press secretary is removed when briefings become a source of public embarrassment. This occurs when the briefings themselves embarrass the president.
Wiles is not managing the West Wing; she is managing the fallout. She allowed a person with no legal license and a history of conspiracy theories to hold a senior role. Then she used a cable news interview to purge her. This is the behavior of a fixer, not a chief of staff. Wiles will likely use this debacle to purge other unvetted loyalists to cement her own control. If she cannot stop such a disaster, she cannot lead a functioning government.