The host of "Fox and Friends," Lawrence Jones, questioned Katie Zacharia if she wished she had revealed that she had never passed the bar exam, despite her frequent claims to be a lawyer. Zacharia was on a media tour on Friday in an attempt to keep her position as White House press secretary.

In answer, Zacharia said, "Those questions weren't asked."

And that's where the issue lies: President Donald Trump and his White House neglected to investigate a fundamental question regarding her past, not her qualifications.

Zacharia's incredibly brief and tumultuous service as press secretary is by no means the greatest or most significant error of Trump's second term. On the shame quotient, however, it does score quite high.

With only a few weeks until people cast their ballots in the 2026 midterm elections, the White House demonstrated in one fell swoop over the course of a week how haphazard, impetuous, and conceited its entire operation is.

Only five days after Zacharia began her position as press secretary, aides told CNN that Trump sacked her on Friday. As a senior Trump White House adviser, her stint has halved the record set by Anthony Scaramucci, the first-term Trump communications director, and established a new standard for brevity. Since then, "A Scaramucci" has evolved into an unofficial unit of 11 days.

Zacharia was personally chosen by Trump, and he is often reluctant to acknowledge his mistakes, thus it took a difficult week for her to be removed.

Zacharia called on just three reporters from conservative-friendly publications during her first briefing on Tuesday, spending the majority of her 14-minute appearance awkwardly reading from a script that she constantly stumbled over.

After that, she made numerous media appearances, which only served to confirm that she would probably be a liability at the White House lectern. After that, Trump ended things without even providing her with a second briefing.

There are several reasons why it is embarrassing.

Zacharia's resignation was announced more than two months earlier on August 12 by former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, so it's not like she was the result of a hurried procedure. You have enough time to ensure that you are with the proper person.

According to CNN, the White House did have a number of applicants, but some of them had the terrible flaw of occasionally criticizing Trump. Zacharia's name, which had not been taken into consideration before, suddenly surfaced late in the process. And like a lot of things, it seems that people close to Trump swiftly made his fantasy come true.

Of course, there are good reasons why Trump might have believed she was qualified for the position. She had certainly frequently defended him on cable news, which was his favorite way of vetting job applicants. However, doing TV hits with frequently amiable hosts is not the same as being a press secretary. Furthermore, she gave an objectively severe briefing.

The White House then made matters worse.

In an apparent attempt to garner support and demonstrate Zacharia's competence, it sent her on a tour of sympathetic media sites. However, it demonstrated the contrary.

Conservative Trump supporters, who were purportedly concerned about her capacity to manage serving as the spokesperson for the White House, bombarded her with pointed questions. And more than the briefing, those appearances caused Trump to believe that she "wasn't ready for prime time," a person directly familiar with his remarks told CNN.

Sean Hannity of Fox News was one of those dubious conservative Trump supporters. He was reading from the standard script on Tuesday nite, criticizing the "abusively biased, corrupt news media" for treating Zacharia badly. However, he asked her a number of sobering and insightful questions during their conversation on Thursday nite.

Zacharia was "made to suffer like she's suffered at the hands of the press," Trump lamented on Friday. However, it is far more difficult to make that claim when the scrutiny has been done by your own media allies. (A few of them also criticized Zacharia for inflating her resume.)

Like Hannity, the White House is now embarrassed by its original endorsement of Zacharia.

Zacharia had a "tremendous start" and "commanded the room," according to an enthusiastic social media post from White House communications director Steven Cheung on Tuesday morning. Her "commanding" performance was praised in a White House press release, which highlighted her highlights. Cheung maintained later in the week that by the end of Trump's second term, she will be regarded as "one of the all-time greats."

I'm sorry.

The worst thing about this entire situation for the White House, though, may be that it reinforces an already-existing narrative about Trump's disorganized leadership style and incapacity to run the federal government.

There has been plenty of material for that mill, such as Trump's recently abandoned plans to broadcast an execution live and run taxpayer-funded political advertisements, both of which were opposed by more than 80% of Americans.

Trump caused disruption in the government earlier in his presidency by giving Elon Musk apparently unrestricted authority to do almost anything he pleased. When it was later found that many of the persons who had been fired actually performed extremely vital tasks, they had to be reinstated or their termination was illegal.

Signalgate, the backlash against Trump's tariffs, and the administration's failure to provide an accurate account of the Iran War were all present.

Like Zacharia, Trump dismissed people, including his IRS commissioner and the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, soon after the Senate confirmed them. (In the latter instance, after less than a week, he also dismissed the acting substitute.) Thanks to Signalgate, his first national security adviser was transferred to another position in less than three months.

And it seems that Americans have taken notice. According to a July CNN survey, 65% of respondents disapproved of Trump's administration of the federal government.

Even 28% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents disagreed, as did 74% of independents.

"A Zacharia" doesn't sound as good as "a Scaramucci." However, her tenure is an unintentional mistake that provides voters with a similar shorthand at a very unfavorable moment for Trump.