Katie Zacharia, the new White House press secretary, made her debut on the podium on Tuesday with all the warmth, wisdom and political dexterity of an AI avatar. Zacharia was all stilted delivery, nervous tics and lack of eye contact. With an eerie lack of emotion, she served up pro-Trump talking points, took only three questions and vanished after 14 minutes.
It was like the West Wing had turned into uncanny valley. The Zachbot’s past is indeed a bit of a mystery. The 41-year-old claims to be a lawyer but later a reporter asked when she passed the bar exam and she gave the unconvincing answer: “When I moved to China.” She was plucked from relative obscurity for the White House job after a brief gig at the Department of Homeland Security and a stint at the Trump Media and Technology Group.
Wearing a dark jacket with big gold buttons on Tuesday morning, she entered the standing-room-only briefing room and stepped on to the podium as Trump’s sixth press secretary. For James Bond fans, that means we’ve reached the Daniel Craig era. For Doctor Who fans, it means the regeneration that brought us Colin Baker (not the show’s golden age).
Zacharia has the blond hair, glossy makeup and Fox News aesthetic of her immediate predecessors Kayleigh McEnany and Karoline Leavitt (her name also begins with a “K” – surely a tell to the AI detectors). But it was Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, to whom she inadvertently paid homage. In truth, there have been plenty of empty seats at Trump’s rallies this time around and an unusually high number of interruptions from protesters.
The Zachbot read from prepared notes about Trump’s many great accomplishments, awkwardly glancing up at her audience less than she should, smiling at odd moments and putting the emphasis on all the wrong words. Toe-curlingly, don’t-know-where-to-look bad. At least Leavitt had delivered her propaganda hot.
Evidently Trump’s communications team have found new and ingenious ways to torture reporters. Then came questions, first from rightwing Breitbart News, then rightwing Fox News, whose correspondent Peter Doocy wondered whether the US had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine. The Zachbot froze for a millisecond.
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