Capital Confusion — What Does It Take to Get Fired by Trump?

Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after five days. The crowning achievement of her extremely brief tenure was that she got to announce that Kimberly Guilfoyle had effectively been fired as ambassador to Greece.

We gotta be honest, we find all of this a little bit confusing.

Sure, in an ordinary administration, Zacharia would have been let go for fudging the truth about whether she was a lawyer (and also for apparently being incompetent and in over her head), and Guilfoyle was pretty openly trying to monetize her supposed access to Donald Trump (and was also apparently incompetent and in over her head).

But this isn’t an ordinary administration.

Everybody from the president on down is lying and corrupt. In fact, Trump is the biggest liar and the most corrupt of them all.

So, what gives? Why these two — especially seeing how Zacharia met the “blonde who looks like Ivanka” criteria for women the president likes to surround himself with, and Guilfoyle, who used to be engaged to Don Jr., (kinda) checked the “family of grifters” box and is sporting a classic Mar-a-Lago face?

In the former ambassador’s case, the answer is pretty clear: While she was trying to enrich herself, she apparently wasn’t cutting in the Don, and that’s a big no-no in Trumpland.

It’s a bit more complicated when it comes to Zacharia’s swift departure.

First of all, she is straight out of “central casting,” as the president likes to put it: a blonde who sounds as though she would walk into traffic for Trump and was clearly willing to lie on his behalf.

The problem with her lawyer fib, which pales in comparison to some of the whoppers her predecessors told on a daily basis, was that it wasn’t done on the Don’s behalf. Instead, she embarrassed him by making it obvious that he hired someone incompetent.

Fortunately for the president, before she could demonstrate too much of that, the helpful folks at Fox News stepped in and showed in a couple of interviews that Zacharia would never be more than a Temu Karoline Leavitt and would therefore have to go.

To be fair to the 120-hour press secretary, she had some big shoes to fill because Leavitt was especially blonde, especially willing to walk into traffic for Trump, and especially willing to lie.

So willing, in fact, that we are wondering who is going to be able to do her job going forward.

Fortunately for the president, finding some crony who wants to be ambassador to Greece should be much easier. They just have to remember to make sure the Don gets his cut.