What Happens Next With Trump WH Comms After Katie Zacharia’s 5-Day Flameout?

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Julie Demaree Nikhinson/AP

TOP STORY

WHAT COMES NEXT

The news broke too late on Friday for the stack to weigh in on Katie Zacharia’s stunning dismissal from her post as White House Press Secretary, but since then, the takes have come fast and furious. Some of the stack appears sympathetic to Zacharia’s plight — or at least to the reality that sometimes a job just doesn’t work out… because the hiree isn’t up to the gig in the first place.

But there are a lot of angles to explore here — including the nature of how the role of press secretary has shifted under both Trump administrations.

THREE TAKES

CJR’s The Media Today, Jem Bartholomew — The press secretary job has changed under Trump, Bartholomew wrote today. Under former presidents, “the messaging of politicians and presidents was so stage-managed that it sometimes seemed as if the spin doctors were really in charge.” But the president is “not hiring someone for an ability to craft a communications strategy, handle relations with journalists, or plant favorable media talking points.” Instead, “He is drawn to people with a certain skill set: kiss-the-ring fealty is high on the list.” As former Trumpian Press Sec Anthony Scaramucci put it, the job also requires one to “lie like a machine-gunner at a turret.” The expectations for the job should shift, Bartholomew added, and perhaps the impetus for doing so lies with the White House press corps, who “should no longer focus exclusively on retaining access, but should work collectively to boost transparency and challenge the prevarications of the person at the podium. The recent weeks of legal fights and pool jostling have shown what solidarity can do—and how much further it might go.”

Barrett Media, Jason Barrett — Zacharia’s quick dismissal offers a lesson that “every broadcasting executive should study,” and one that Barrett has experience with after he hired former baseball player Aubrey Huff to join the 95.7 The Game radio show in San Francisco. Barrett chronicled how he knew it wasn’t working out with Huff fairly quickly, and decided to cut bait quickly rather than double down on a bad decision simply to avoid having egg on his face. Parting ways was the right call, and “the worse move would have been hanging on out of fear of the backlash.” The Trump White House had options, and could have “defended the hire, blamed the press and waited it out.” Instead, they moved on quickly, a decision that is “the best outcome for Zacharia,” who can now “explore other professional situations without people constantly putting her reputation under a microscope.” It also helps the president, especially with midterms looming: “He needs a press secretary driving his message, not becoming the message.” The White House press corps will hopefully get “a credible spokesperson who can answer questions,” and the next press secretary “will look steady by comparison.”

Breitbart, Elizabeth Weibel — Zacharia departs her role with “lots of fans beyond just the president throughout the administration,” — Breitbart’s Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle wrote on X Friday. Weibel elevated that comment as well as the president’s insistence that the ousted press secretary was treated “badly” by members of the media. Despite the best efforts of both the Trump administration and conservative media to give Zacharia the softest of landings, it’s clear that there is no real way to describe her short tenure as anything other than a debacle.

TAKEAWAY: Will we get a new White House Press Secretary before the midterms? It’s not clear the president — and perhaps chief of staff Susie Wiles — is in any type of a rush toward that goal. The coming days should illuminate whether the White House feels the administration can more adequately relay its own messaging, and it’s likely Trump doesn’t want to suffer a second embarrassment so soon, especially knowing the White House Press Corps (and the rest of the media) will be watching more closely than ever. The bet is that the president will handle his own comms for the final two weeks before the midterms. Long-term, there remains the question of whether there’s anyone who can clear Trump’s very high bar for loyalty while still carrying out the job in a serious, professional manner. As the Zacharia episode made abundantly clear: Karoline Leavitts do not grow on trees.

📰 TOP SCOOPS & ANALYSIS 📰

SCOOP The Washington Sun, Evan McMorris-Santoro, Jasmine Wright, Manuela Silva, and Jenna Monin — A source familiar with Trump’s response to the Zacharia “situation” told The Washington Sun that while he wasn’t as concerned about the stories as has been reported, articles that indicated Wiles “was on the chopping block” prompted a strong response: “If she goes, I go.” The president is also being told “not to worry about any staffing shakeups until after the midterm elections.” A source told the outlet that last week “shows that White House system works,” something that emboldens Wiles and “weakens those fighting against her.”

SCOOP The Washington Sun, Evan McMorris-Santoro, Jasmine Wright, Manuela Silva, and Jenna Monin — The Washington Sun has back-to-back scoops this morning because the second wasn’t widely covered. “The Trump administration is moving forward on plans to impose financial penalties on Americans in default on their federal student loans and hire private debt collectors to go after them,” The Sun reported. But they’re “unlikely” to announce those plans until after the midterms, because “officials expressed concerns last year that too aggressively pursuing these measures could hurt low-income borrowers and that scores of Trump supporters would be seriously affected by going after the wages and benefits of workers who are, in many cases, struggling to hold onto their jobs.”

SCOOP Status, Natalie Korach — MS NOW wasn’t the only news organization to receive a tip that FBI Director Kash Patel was traveling to Russia when he was really in Virginia last week. Status has since found out that “at least one other news outlet was approached with the same claim about Patel, but declined to run it after further investigation.” It is still “unclear” who fed the report in the first place, and MS NOW’s “leadership is taking the situation seriously, conducting a review of the reporting and approval process and meeting with the people involved to understand how the error happened.” There will also be changes to the editorial workflow at the network, which may include “plans to elevate more reporting to the standards department—which also serves other Versant properties, including CNBC—before it reaches viewers.”

SCOOP Semafor, Max Tani — CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has “clashed” with her team over stories about the Middle East (especially about Israel and Gaza), and has been “pushing” the network’s staff to “pursue numerous stories related to the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, and his purported familial links to the Muslim Brotherhood.” But there’s pushback, and “some CBS News staff have privately grumbled that Weiss hasn’t extended the same enthusiastic scrutiny to other candidates on the right.”

ANALYSIS The Bulwark’s Morning Shots, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger — The “United States spent last week handicapping Ukraine’s war efforts in big and small ways,” after the president’s “birthday chat” with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Last Friday, Trump gave Putin “even more sanctions relief—preventing new sanctions on Russia and tariffs on buyers of Russian oil from going into effect,” even though he’s the one who “signed those sanctions into law just last month.” The Russian about-face has illuminated the president’s position on Putin and the country: “Nothing but incentives and wheedling praise for Russia, the war’s imperial aggressor, and nothing but threats and insults for Ukraine, the war’s blameless defender.”

ANALYSIS The Poynter Report, Tom Jones — The White House has come up with a “workaround” for leaving CNN out of the press pool, Angela Fu wrote: making sure Real America News is “waiting in the wings, ready to provide pool footage after the other major networks declined to take CNN’s place.” In fact, the White House “has three times given Real America’s Voice the secondary TV slot on a day CNN was excluded from the primary slot,” a pattern that “appears to be an attempt by the White House, which took over the pool last year, to circumvent opposition among the major networks and other outlets to its efforts to restrict CNN’s press access.”

ANALYSIS CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford apologized after she said Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed offered an “uninterrupted three-minute diatribe” to a conservative influencer who asked him to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood (which he readily did). That apology “overshadowed” the network’s successful town hall featuring Vice President JD Vance, and it “gave fresh ammunition to the news organization’s critics.”

ANALYSIS The Federalist, Christopher Jacobs — Though Democrats have long offered Americans “class warfare rhetoric” including “attacks on ‘the 1 percent’ and ‘millionaires and billionaires,’” that “type of rhetoric ignores the welfare state’s perpetual growth,” Jacobs wrote. This is happening even though “government programs and payments to low-income households have continued to grow” and “subsidies provided through the tax code,” such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, the child tax credit, and Obamacare Exchange subsidies, have meant “that individuals can claim them (i.e., receive a government check) even if they have no income tax liability.” As a result, “low-income households paid an average of about 8-10 percent of income in federal taxes, now they barely pay any at all,” which poses two questions: “How big will federal redistribution become if Democrats get to enact their favored policies? Even if we could afford to do so … is it politically sustainable to have one-fifth or more of the population in any given year not contributing to the federal government?”

📈BUSINESS OF MEDIA 🎥

Digiday Daily, Jim Cooper & Sara Jerde — Amazon is utilizing its Thursday Night Football coverage as a one-two-punch sales pitch to expand Prime Video ad revenue. It’s targeting non-endemic advertisers like American Express while also upselling endemic consumer brands like Colgate into live sports inventory. QUOTE  “For the e-commerce giant, Thursday Night Football coverage has proven a particularly useful tool to expand its advertising and streaming business. The company has successfully used the TNF audience to convert brands that don’t sell products on its e-commerce site, like American Express, amid fierce competition among DSP providers.”

Semafor Media, Graph Massara — Basic cable ad revenue is down… except for at (surprise, surprise) ESPN and Fox News. ESPN is up 7% and FNC is up 7.5%. QUOTE  “Ad revenue across basic cable overall fell 6.7% year-over-year in 2025, to its lowest level since 2006, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan analysis, as cord-cutting continues apace.”

ADWEEK Daily, Mark Stenberg — AI startup Netomi, backed by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture firm WNDR, expanded its senior leadership team following a $100 million funding round aimed at moving artificial intelligence beyond chatboxes and directly into website infrastructure.

Semafor Media, Max Tani — The New York Times ran a digital video ad campaign for financial services firm TIAA directly inside its Instagram Stories, crossing the legacy paper’s traditional line between editorial social feeds and commercial placements. A spokesperson says this has been going on for two years. QUOTE  “It’s a notable move for the paper, which enforces hard lines between its editorial and commercial operations — its podcast hosts don’t read advertisements on their shows, and partners’ messages are kept at a relative distance from The New York Times brand.”

CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — A24’s new release You Can See Everything scored $15 million in its opening weekend, securing the second-largest box-office debut for a non-music documentary in history. QUOTE  “‘The film has an extraordinarily high 99% ‘fresh score’ on Rotten Tomatoes and a record-high 4.8 rating on Letterboxd. It officially opens nationwide in a few days and will surely benefit from all of this buzz.”

Page Six Hollywood, Ian Mohr — TikTok restored Bleecker Street’s promotional ad account for Alex Gibney‘s documentary Musk following an abrupt suspension, attributing the account freeze to an administrative error after the filmmakers leveraged the ban for viral publicity.

OTHER COOL STUFF

Page Six Hollywood — Universal Studios’ new high-speed roller coaster “Fast & Furious: Hollywood Drift” has pushed neighboring Toluca Lake residents to their limit over all the screaming. A whopping 350 locals attended Universal’s “community meeting” to voice displeasure and were allegedly told to wear noise-canceling headphones. They responded with protest posters featuring Marie Antoinette in Ray-Bans and captioned, “Let Them Wear Headphones.”

ADWEEK Daily — ADWEEK always rounds up the latest notable ad campaigns, but this week we got quite the eclectic mix of creative, branded products: There’s a “big ass bag” from Chipotle, dancing human hands from Oura, and a Pringles can/funeral urn hybrid.

👀 WHAT GOT MISSED? 👀

CNN’s Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter — Meta issued an apology for temporarily suspending the official No Kings account Saturday, the same day the organization held nationwide voter turnout events. The company “blamed the account’s temporary suspension on an automated action that’s triggered ‘when accounts post, share or comment at very high frequencies,’” but Stelter made a point of elevating commentary from Sen. Chris Murphy. He said in part, “How were they not ready for the biggest day of anti-Trump protest of the campaign? If it wasn’t malevolence, it was likely a natural consequence of a company that is desperate to get as close to Trump as possible.”

🏆 NEWSLETTER OF THE DAY 🏆

The Washington Sun, Evan McMorris-Santoro, Jasmine Wright, Manuela Silva, and Jenna Monin — Two scoops is impressive, and indicative of the kind of work The Sun is consistently producing each day. The Sun also regularly connects with White House sources that provide glimpses into the day-to-day of Trump 2.0, and the official line. This all combined today for a compelling read on the city at the center of the political reality we all live in, especially during the last-minute sprint toward this year’s midterm elections.

This newsletter was produced by Lindsey Ellefson.