No ‘turmoil’ at the White House
The media had a field day with Katie Zacharia’s short tenure, but claims of chaos in the Trump administration are exaggerated.
In the months leading up to the disastrous 2006 election, President George W Bush fired his press secretary, Scott McClellan, and withdrew the Supreme Court nomination of his close confidante, Harriet Miers.
He waited until after the midterms, in which the Republicans lost control of the United States Congress, to fire Donald Rumsfeld as his secretary of defence, who had led the increasingly unpopular war against Iraq.
History repeats itself imperfectly.
Last week, President Donald Trump abruptly pulled the plug on Katie Zacharia after she had served just five short days as the White House spokesperson. Aside from her own dismissal, the biggest news Zacharia delivered was Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ouster from her position as the ambassador to Greece.
It is rumoured that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is now on the chopping block, especially after the president rejected his plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, a terrorist who shot 13 people at Fort Hood military base in 2009.
Obviously, there are differences between the two presidencies.
McClellan had been the press secretary for three years, not five days. Miers was not embroiled in scandal when her nomination was pulled. The media and the Senate just questioned her qualifications. And the war with Iran is not as bloody or as costly as the US invasion of Iraq turned out to be.
But the second half of the second term of all US presidents can be rocky.
In President Ronald Reagan’s second term, his press team dealt with the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal. In President Bill Clinton’s second term, the Monica Lewinsky affair drove the news. President Richard Nixon faced impeachment in his second term. President Barack Obama had to deal with the scandal surrounding the Benghazi consulate attack in Libya throughout his second term, which also embroiled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Staff turmoil is also not unusual in the White House under any president, especially in the second term and especially when the voters are angry and the polls look dire.
Every midterm election is a referendum on the president, and it is not uncommon for the president’s party to be punished at the ballot box. In fact, in 18 of the 20 midterms held over the past 80 years, the governing party has lost seats in Congress.
The Trump administration is indeed facing troubles with the continuing US-Israel war on Iran and high energy prices. But a press secretary’s dismissal is hardly a sign of a serious crisis in the administration.
It is unclear how Zacharia got the job. She did not work on Trump’s re-election campaign, and while she has done media appearances in the past, she is by no means a working journalist. She briefly served in the press shop of the Department of Homeland Security when Kristi Noem was secretary. But given Noem’s short-lived tenure, rocked by various controversies and her own dismissal in March, that was hardly a positive experience.
Press reports have hinted that the president himself made the decision to hire Zacharia and that the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, was not an essential part of the process.
Trump saw that there was a problem with Zacharia and moved swiftly to deal with it to cut his losses. He has demonstrated he is clearly in control and his administration is not “falling apart” or “in turmoil” as media headlines have declared.
Not all presidents have moved as decisively as he has.
President Joe Biden, for example, should have done the same thing with his last spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre. She was every bit as incompetent as Zacharia, but Biden allowed her to stay in the job for three years, about the same tenure as McClellan.
Hopefully, Trump and his team will learn a valuable lesson about this sorry episode. Hiring incompetent people and putting them out for the press to destroy is not good for the White House, nor for the people they hire and are then forced to fire.
Trump deserves credit for moving quickly to remove Zacharia before she became more of an embarrassment. He also deserves credit for firing Kimberly Guilfoyle, a personal friend, for her alleged corruption in Europe.
But what the president really needs is a better process for hiring more competent people in the first place. Maybe next time he should check with his chief of staff first.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
