Trump’s botched execution on Katie Zacharia speaks volumes about Susie Wiles’ future
Por Andrew Feinberg — – World RSS Feed
analysis Trump’s botched execution on Katie Zacharia speaks volumes about Susie Wiles’ future
Reports of the chief of staff’s impending demise were shown to be greatly exaggerated as the Trumpworld boss made quick work of the president’s impulse hire, making her an example of what happens when she’s left out of the loop, Andrew Feinberg writes
Tuesday 20 October 2026 12:01 BST
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I t didn’t take Susie Wiles more than a few day to put a stop to the buzz in Washington that predicted her time as chief of staff was up.
The rumors started swirling on Thursday when Politico reported President Donald Trump had been on the phone with his friends and informal advisors asking if they thought he should replace Wiles, his longest-serving chief of staff.
Citing four sources with direct knowledge of the president’s conversations, the outlet reported that Trump had been floating several names for a successor to the veteran Florida political operative, who is the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff.
A day later, more reports indicated that Trump’s close aide Natalie Harp had been bringing him articles about the possibility of replacing Wiles, which caused him to fly off the handle and make even more calls to more allies, with another source claiming that Wiles and her team were frantically calling people all over town to get them to vouch for her in turn.
The evidence for Wiles’ tentative grip on her post had shown up at the White House days earlier in the form of Katie Zacharia, who Trump hired as his press secretary the previous Friday without informing Wiles, who had been working for weeks to secure CNN’s resident MAGA voice Scott Jennings as Karoline Leavitt’s replacement.
She lasted from Monday to Friday.
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open image in galleryDuring her 14 minutes at the podium on Tuesday, Zacharia read haltingly off a script for eight of those minutes, answered three questions from friendly media outlets, referred to her husband as “my president,” and announced the firing of the ambassador to Greece as she walked out the door.
The same day, she was pressed on reports that she’d never passed any state bar despite holding herself out as a “lawyer” in multiple television appearances over the last year.
The story festered on Wednesday and Thursday as Zacharias attempted to clean up the mess by claiming some difference between the terms “lawyer” and ‘attorney” before conceding that she’d failed the California bar exam and never retaken it.
That’s when Wiles appears to have struck.
That night, Zacharia appeared on Fox News host — and close confidant of Trump — Sean Hannity’s program for a train-wreck of an interview that was as bad as, if not worse than, her brief briefing had been days earlier.
Hannity opened his show by telling Zacharia that her briefing had been “widely panned,” then walked Zacharia through the bar exam question until Zacharia admitted that she had never taken it again.
open image in gallery
open image in galleryAnother hit on the Fox & Friends morning show on Friday didn’t go much better, and by the end of the day, Zacharia was given the boot minutes after Trump told reporters he’d told her she should “reconsider” her decision to take the job.
A source told Politico that the Fox bookings were a “sanctioned hit,” and another source was more blunt,” describing the chief of staff as having “fed her to Hannity.”
Denials were rapid and came from everywhere, with White House Communications Director Steven Cheung calling the report “fiction that’s not even creative” and a senior White House official alleging that Wiles “did not need to feed her to Sean or anybody else” because “it’s not her style.”
Fox News told The Independent that Hannity books his own guests and that “Susie Wiles and Danielle Alvarez had nothing to do with the booking.” Others suggested that Zacharia had sealed her fate in the briefing room on Tuesday without any help from anyone.
Does any of that matter? Not really, because the message sent by the ex-press secretary’s quick ouster was clear.
After the president went around his chief of staff to hire an unqualified TV personality as his top spokesperson, his choice was disassembled on his favorite TV channel within 72 hours, leading him to all but fire her himself on the South Lawn while Marine One idled behind him.
If anyone spent last week measuring the drapes in the chief of staff’s office, seeing Zacharia’s hide nailed to Wiles’ wall was a useful warning.
open image in galleryIn contrast to Zacharia, on the short end of the scale, Wiles has lasted longer in her job than anyone Trump has had in it across two administrations, and the West Wing has gone two years without the leak wars that characterized 2017.
Going around Wiles to hire the second press secretary of his second term produced, on a compressed schedule, exactly the kind of personnel disaster her process exists to prevent — nobody in the White House vetting even asked Zacharia about the bar exam, as she told Fox & Friends herself the next morning.
Trump, who has been known to fib about such things, subsequently said there is “zero chance” he replaces Wiles and that she has his “COMPLETE confidence,” and a White House spokesperson told The Independent last week that “these anonymous sources know nothing.”
Those statements are worth what they usually are. The demonstration is worth far more.
Meanwhile, the names still being circulated to replace Wiles are mostly men Trump knows from television, from Palm Beach, or from the campaign — the same “central casting” process that just produced five days of Katie Zacharia. Anyone on that list would do well to study what happened to the last person who arrived by that route.
Wiles’ superpower was never that Trump could not go around her. It was that he did not.
He did, once, and the entire world got to see how it ended.
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Susie WilesKatie ZachariaDonald TrumpWhite HouseNatalie HarpKaroline Leavittchief of staffpress secretary
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