On this day in 1964, civil rights campaigner Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize. Just 35, he was then the youngest person ever given the honor. Donald Trump is now 80 and has still not been awarded the prize he so desperately and openly craves.
Good morning. Martin and Swin here, writing up another utterly bizarre day in Donald Trump’s DC. Martin at least is old enough to have already been quite old 10 years ago, when Sean Spicer kicked off the world of weird that is Trump press secretaries, their press conferences, and their relationships with both reporters and the basic concept of truth. There have been some doozies, but it seems that under new pick Katie Zacharia, things are about to get stranger still.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we take a look at Zacharia’s terrible, no good, absolutely horrible first press briefing and the gathering fallout from it. We also consider new steps in Trump’s shamelessly political investigation of Ilhan Omar, and take in developments in the illegal Iran War and on the midterms trail. In and on we go.
‘She’s Flopping’
Speaking to reporters before leaving the White House for Alaska, Donald Trump said he thought his new press secretary, ex-Fox talking head and ardent hate, conspiracy, and extremism monger Katie Zacharia, was “very good” in her first briefing, which concluded not long before.
Safe to say, few reporters or pundits shared the president’s confidence. In barely 15 minutes at the briefing room podium, Zacharia read extremely haltingly from notes, head down, then took very few questions, calling only on right-wing sources: Breitbart, Fox, and the Daily Mail.
She failed to give an answer on whether the U.S. was still sharing intelligence with Ukraine. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” she said. A softball about doing her job as a mother of four produced a flub, referring to “My president, excuse me, my husband. That’s a good one.” That at least raised a laugh. Another question produced hard news, Zacharia saying, “We have asked Ambassador Guilfoyle to resign,” meaning envoy to Greece (and former Donald Trump Jr. fiancée) Kimberly Guilfoyle, who has been caught up in corruption allegations. That made an impact, but Zacharia blurted on for a bit about learning about work-life balance from predecessor Karoline Leavitt, voice shaking all the while, and then was outta there pronto.
It wasn’t just pundits who piled onto the airwaves to voice their astonishment. Swin admits he had not realized Zacharia was taking her bow, what with having been buried in projects including a lengthy profile of White House Wormtongue Stephen Miller.
Getting very annoyed at the sound of his phone constantly dinging, Swin finally took a swift look. Republican operatives, Trump advisers, and administration officials were blowing up the phone, panning Zacharia’s performance.