What a relief. Within days of Katie Zacharia taking the podium as White House press secretary, she was fired. Many were taken aback by her clear inability to do the job effectively, and when you add the whole “I’m a lawyer” credential problem on top of that, it was clear she had to go. The White House Press Secretary should be an effective communicator with credibility, and she was neither. The funny thing, though, is the way Democrats have pounced on this story and inadvertently exposed their hypocrisy on DEI.
Zacharia’s first briefing on Tuesday ran just 14 minutes. She took questions from three journalists, leaned heavily on her notes, and at one point called her husband "my president." Leavitt's first briefing, by comparison, went nearly 47 minutes. The excuse we were given was her lack of preparation time, but subsequent interviews on Fox & Friends and Hannity made it clear that even on friendly ground, she couldn’t hack it. Make no mistake about it, Karoline Leavitt is a tough act to follow, perhaps impossible, but President Donald Trump deserves better than that for a press secretary. That’s why I’m all for her being shown the door.
Related: Here’s How White House Insiders Engineered Zacharia’s Exit
But seriously, when the left started attacking, I thought, “Wow, they really need to sit this one out.
Let’s take CNN’s Van Jones. "If this woman were black, the whole conversation would be about DEI," Jones wrote in a post on X. "Funny how when white employees fail, nobody mentions THEIR race or ethnicity. And yet — how much of Trump's administration is just affirmative action for nice-looking white people?"
If this woman were black, the whole conversation would be about DEI. Funny how when white employees fail, nobody mentions THEIR race or ethnicity. And yet — how much of Trump’s administration is just affirmative action for nice-looking white people? https://t.co/AXt4zJZcSx
— Van Jones (@VanJones68) October 16, 2026
Jones clearly didn't think that one through.
For starters, people on both the left and the right are already making an issue of Zacharia being essentially a blonde DEI hire, so his premise collapses when it meets the actual conversation.
The real point Jones and others on the left miss is that Zacharia's tenure lasted a week, and her own boss was nudging her out.
Compare that to Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden's second press secretary. She bombed her first briefing too, yet the media lavished her with praise for being a Black Lesbian Woman™ and the daughter of immigrants. It was shameless gushing over someone who was clearly not good at the job she was hired to do.
And the performance problems never went away.
Jean-Pierre was so bad at the job; she was clearly doing a disservice to the Biden administration. But Joe Biden couldn't fire her because of her race and sexuality. Being a racial minority on top of being LGBT was like getting automatic tenure. So, they couldn’t fire her. Instead, they brought in a white guy, then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, to literally babysit her press briefings.
Consider the pattern. The Biden administration's obsession with DEI kept Jean-Pierre in place despite her obvious failures. That same obsession explains why Lloyd Austin kept his job as defense secretary after the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, and again after the scandal over his going missing for medical reasons. In each case, the official’s identity mattered more than anything else.
Zacharia is on her way out because she was bad at the job she was brought in to do. That's a huge difference from the Biden administration, where incompetence was tolerated.
