Katie Zacharia was a good fit to be Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, meaning she would to say anything to please the boss. But she was a lousy liar who became ridiculed for calling herself a lawyer despite never passing the bar exam and Trump canned her after five days and a single brief single disastrous press conference on Tuesday.

So much for the Scaramucci unit of time as 10 days; the Zacharia is only half of that.

One almost feels bad for Zacharia, but really she should have known what she was walking into. If there’s been one motif to Trump’s personnel decisions throughout his tenures in office, it’s that he demands slavish devotion from his underlings, but he will never, ever reciprocate. The second he feels like you no longer benefit him personally or politically, well, he’s never even heard of you.

We know exactly why the president chose this clearly unqualified charlatan to perform one of the most important communication jobs in the world: He saw her on TV praising him and thought that she looked the part — meaning thin, blonde and spray tanned — and offered her the job.

During his first term, Trump was forced to rely on a corps of longtime Washington insiders and career officials to actually staff the upper echelons of his administration, before he had fully taken over the GOP and his political grievance movement had totally matured.

Now, he can go with all true believers, regardless of resumé and qualifications. With a GOP Senate unwilling to seriously carry out it constitutional duty on confirmations, he can have cranks and kooks like Tulsi Gabbard, his fired director of national intelligence, and Bobby Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. Or he can have the unqualified like Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon and Kash Patel running the FBI. And he can have attractive women with little preparation as his designated liars in the press briefing room.

Zacharia’s downfall was not that she is a liar without any interest in working with the assembled press covering the White House; that is a boon, even a requirement, for the job under Trump. No, her great misstep was that she was stilted, awkward, and easily thrown by reporters’ questions — essentially, that she could not perform her role and say her lines in this made-for-TV presidency.

Unfortunately, much as Trump understands what he’s doing as a performance he has to keep up while he gets rich on the side, he is still the real president and the decisions he and his administration make affect billions of people, here and around the world.

So, we will likely soon get another White House press secretary, who may look substantially like Zacharia or her predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, but will be better at confidently lying and misleading the press and the public, which is the real intent of the role. Not that press secretaries have always been forthcoming and truthful, but they once understood their job primarily as to communicate about their administrations’ initiatives and spin the news, not to manufacture reality whole cloth to feed to increasingly disillusioned supporters.

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