Days into a tumultuous tenure as White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia sought to clear the air. In her first sit-down interview in the role on Thursday, she defended her rocky performance during Tuesday’s debut briefing, arguing that the tight turnaround — and not her skills as a communicator — was to blame.
Zacharia said President Donald Trump called unexpectedly on Oct. 7, as she was getting ready to take her 5-year-old son on a field trip. She flew to Washington the next day, met Trump and accepted the position Friday, returned to California on Saturday to pack and was back in D.C. to start the job Monday.
“He asked me to be in office on Monday, and Monday I showed up,” she said.
She chose familiar ground to make her case. The interview with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec was pre-taped at the White House and aired Thursday on Real America’s Voice. Zacharia appeared on his program “Human Events Daily” earlier this summer, and Posobiec told viewers that Zacharia had been on “many, many times.” Before Trump tapped her to be his chief spokesperson, she had made regular appearances on Fox News and Newsmax.
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The Columbus Day holiday, she said, added to the chaos and confusion of the condensed timeline. Zacharia told Posobiec that she didn’t feel adequately prepared ahead of that first briefing. The initial batch of packets meant to ready her for the questions she could face from the White House press corps arrived late Monday evening, and those documents were not finalized until around 8 a.m., she said, with the briefing set to begin just 90 minutes later.
“I never had a full briefing beforehand,” she said, adding that she woke up early on Tuesday to “prepare with what I had.”
Zacharia said she expected that first briefing to begin at 9:30 a.m. — a time Trump had announced in a social media post — and end by 10, when the president was scheduled to depart the White House for his trip to Alaska. But her time in the briefing room ultimately lasted just 14 minutes.
Though she said she never asked for the press secretary job, Zacharia said she used her TV appearances as an audition of sorts. During her time working as an adviser to Trump Media, she tracked what the president was saying on Truth Social to guide what she said during her TV interviews.
“I tracked every news hit to be in accordance with what policies he was pushing forward,” she said. “I wanted to audition for it.”
Telling Posobiec that when reporters asked about her interest in the job after Karoline Leavitt’s departure in August, she told them she was not “lobbying” it.
“My philosophy is I’m on TV enough where if he sees me and he likes me, then I will be recruited for the job.”
Zacharia also discussed one of the most buzzed-about topics of her nascent tenure — confirming that she had not passed the bar exam since graduating law school.
She said she sat for the California bar while preparing to move to Beijing to join her husband, calling the unsuccessful attempt “somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China.”
She worked on cross-border shareholder agreements with the international practice of Zhong Lun Law Firm, where she said her law degree gave her “enough credentials” to do the work.
Similar to what she told The New York Times, the press secretary said she was told by legal experts she consulted that she could describe herself as a “lawyer” but not as an “attorney,” and could offer “legal analysis, not legal advice.”
Posobiec, who has also lived in China, devoted a long stretch of the interview to Beijing.
Zacharia defended Trump against criticism that he was too deferential to Chinese President Xi Jinping during last month’s state visit, which drew objections from Republicans including Sen. Roger Wicker, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Deference is how deals get done, she said. Trump was “effectuating his ability to get that deal, rather than just kowtowing or showing favor.”
Asked whether she was following the coverage of herself, she said no.
“I’m not watching anything right now,” Zacharia said, “except what [Trump is] doing.”
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