Exclusive: Trump’s New Press Secretary Used AI To ‘Write’ Fawning Columns That Helped Get Her The Job

Like most Americans who saw clips of Katie Zacharia’s debut as the newest Baghdad Bob White House press secretary, I was taken aback by how utterly unprepared she was, and the apparently Herculean struggle required for her to read a handful of sentences aloud, slowly, as she introduced herself.

“Her reading is good for an 11-year-old,” Jimmy Kimmel quipped the following night, and the social web’s been buzzing with bets over whether she’ll last a full Scaramucci before Trump Apprentices her and declares she’s “a terrible person” who was unworthy of lying to Americans on his behalf.

So last night I was reading a story about the fact that, while she’s been loudly and frequently telling anyone willing to listen that she’s a lawyer, no one can find any records that Zacharia passed a bar exam in any US state.

When a reporter asked Trump where Zacharia served as a practicing attorney, the president turned and gestured to Zacharia, who smiled and said “When I moved to China.”

There are just a few small problems with that. China’s bar equivalent is the National Unified Legal Professional Qualification Examination, commonly known as the Fakao. It is notoriously difficult, and it’s only administered in Mandarin, Mongolian, Kazakh, Uyghur and Korean. Also, only citizens of China can take the exam.

Zacharia previously told an interviewer she speaks “a bit of Mandarin,” mostly conversational, and she spent less than three years in the country, which means she would not be able to pass the Fakao even if the test didn’t have a nationality requirement.

There’s a nonzero chance she watched the Netflix Korean drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo a few thousand times, got Xi Jinping to personally waive the citizenship requirement and passed the exam on a combination of osmotic knowledge and luck, just like I can’t entirely eliminate the possibility that my cat is a Bengal tiger with dwarfism.

But that still doesn’t explain why Zacharia claims she held positions as chief counsel and specialist in particular areas of law for US corporations. She could not serve in those roles if she was not an attorney.

Then the story mentioned Zacharia got the job as press secretary partly on the strength of her relentless glazing of the president in columns she wrote for California Globe, a “non-partisan” politics-oriented site with a focus on the Golden State.

Now I was interested. Perhaps Zacharia isn’t marginally literate and her disastrous debut at the White House podium was due to nerves, particularly at the prospect of serving a man who, in her words, is “without a doubt the greatest president the world has ever seen.”

Zacharia’s columns are saturated with slobbering praise calling Trump an “unparalleled titan of American politics,” a “visionary leader” possessed of “unmatched courage” and “a resolve that defies comprehension.”

Her columns credit him with accomplishments equaling or surpassing those of George Washington, of singlehandedly saving our republic from the shadowy forces of deep state evil. They portray him striding across our political landscape like a colossus who also happens to be a “beacon of liberty,” a mobile lighthouse (AI loves using lighthouses in metaphors) whose towering steps between golf courses and McDonald’s rally True Patriots to America-loving endeavors like storming the Capitol for attempted insurrection. Zacharia also paints Trump, naturally, as the world’s foremost champion of election integrity.

There was another quality to the columns worth noting: they were written by AI.

That is not to say they’re good, because AI writing never is. Rather, they’re the sort of thing a person like Zacharia thinks is impressive, filled with the kind of overwrought language ChatGPT generates when the person doing the prompting asks for moving prose but can’t articulate what that looks like and is too lazy to offer much more than “Write a column describing all the ways Donald Trump is awesome and the greatest president in history. Oh! And flatter him a lot so he’ll notice I exist, I’m blonde, and I kind of look like Ivanka if you squint from a distance. Or that conniving Natalie Harp, who totally doesn’t deserve to be so close to Presisent Trump!”

The columns are saturated with the sort of over-the-top superlatives Trump and his minions believe are acceptable substitutes for basic qualities like integrity and compassion. They vacillate between bursts of excessive glazing and demonstrable lies about the president’s accomplishments, which in reality amount to little more than setting the world on fire while increasing his net worth and that of his minions by many billions.

They’re marked by telltale AI clutches, sentence construction, and the underlying rhythm of the language.

Every Zacharia column I ran through Pangram, the premier AI writing detection tool, came back as between 89% and 100% AI written. Perhaps most conclusively, the woman we saw bumbling through sentences equivalent to the prose of a children’s book is not capable of constructing the columns, as bad as they are.

Zacharia’s efforts were so sloppy, she didn’t bother to remove the bolding and other formatting tendencies that mark text as the output of an LLM, in this case ChatGPT:

Katie Zacharia is not a clever person. Anyone who thinks they can lie their way into a role that comes with national scrutiny, communicating daily to people whose job involves intellectual curiosity, really hasn’t taken into account what happens the second the story becomes about her instead of the Iran war, the midterm races or one of Trump’s other hires behaving disgracefully. Granted, there’s plenty of the latter, although even Kimberly Guilfoyle’s ignominious end as a “public servant” didn’t distract reporters and the public from the Zacharian train wreck they were watching in real time.

Unfortunately for Zacharia, the story became about her the moment she stepped up to that podium. If I were a prediction market guy, I’d put my money on Katie surviving a single Zacharia, a unit of time equal to about half a Scaramucci.

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If you’re here for the first time, yes, this is a cat blog, and yes, I believe felines should serve as heads of state. The world can’t possibly be any worse under their leadership, and we’d all be much better rested.

Header image credit: The White House