I have never watched a White House press briefing on purpose, and I’m not proud of that, but I watched Katie Zacharia’s first one twice before lunch. The new press secretary’s debut on Tuesday lasted 14 minutes, took questions from three outlets and included a moment where she called her husband “my president” before catching herself. By the afternoon, Katie Zacharia memes were everywhere, and a head of lettuce with googly eyes had a countdown going.
What Actually Happened in Those 14 Minutes
Zacharia, a former Newsmax commentator, replaced Karoline Leavitt, who resigned in August. According to AP’s report on Katie Zacharia’s debut as press secretary, she read mostly from her script, called on Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail, then sent everyone outside to ask Trump directly. The one real headline was that the White House had asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as ambassador to Greece. The line people actually remember came when the Daily Mail asked how she would manage with her family in California: “So my president, excuse me, my husband, that’s a good one.”
Trump called the debut excellent. Not everyone agreed. The Guardian’s sketch of the press briefing nicknamed her the Zachbot, which is the kind of nickname you never get rid of, and a question about when she passed the bar got the answer “When I moved to China,” which I have now thought about more than my own taxes.
Is This a Briefing or an SNL Cold Open?
The SNL comparison showed up first and stuck the hardest. Jen Psaki, who held the job under Biden, posted that the briefing was basically an SNL skit, except it wasn’t, and Aaron Rupar, whose clips did most of the traveling, called it a cold open come to life. My favorite version worries about the cast. If the real thing already has the pauses and the punchlines, what is the writers’ room supposed to do on Saturday?
Then came the rankings. A line about record rally attendance reminded people of Sean Spicer’s crowd-size debut in 2017, and @covie_93 was quick to congratulate Spicer on no longer holding the bottom spot. Leavitt got upgraded to Winston Churchill by comparison. That’s the fastest reputation rehab in Washington history, and nobody even had to go on a podcast.
The Katie Zacharia Memes Got Weirdly Specific
The best jokes skipped the politics and went straight to character work. @VeryBadLlama decided she was built in a lab to give the maid of honour speech for a couple named Jaxson and Brayleigh who met at a tailgate, and I felt that one in my chest, because I once gave a best man toast off my phone notes and looked up zero times. Others went with a student government assembly, a Buffalo Wild Wings meltdown and a Fox News chyron with a concussion.
A whole other wing of the replies got stuck on the reading. She looked down at her notes for most of it, which, to be fair, is how I read a menu, but it turned the delivery into a talent show request. One person wanted to hear her try Dr. Seuss, and Michael McKean dug up the most famous pageant answer of 2007 for a callback that only lands if you were online back then.
Official accounts couldn’t resist either. The Democrats’ account posted a thumbs-up that was doing a lot of sarcastic heavy lifting, and Mike Drucker got his whole point across with one word in capital letters.
Somebody Get the Lettuce
And then came the vegetable. Back in 2022, a British tabloid livestreamed a head of lettuce to see whether it would outlast Prime Minister Liz Truss, who lasted 49 days, and the lettuce won. On Tuesday, @ProjectLincoln posted a framed photo of Zacharia beside a lettuce with googly eyes and asked whether she could outlast it. Anthony Scaramucci, whose 11 days as communications director became a unit of measurement, posted that the clock was running and she was at 1/11th of a Scaramucci.
The British replies are the best part, because they have been waiting for this. One guy is proud of his culture, another called it soft power, and a third declared the lettuce Britain’s only major cultural export of the 2020s, which is rude to a lot of bands, but I’m not going to argue. I spent a week in London once and the most culture I absorbed was a meal deal.
So here’s what I need from you: does she outlast the lettuce, or does the lettuce pick up its second win? Briefing number two is going to tell us a lot, and I’ll be watching, which is two more briefings than I watched all of last year.
Confession: I went back and reread Karoline Leavitt Memes After the Least Surprising Job Move of the Year just to remember how the last chapter of this job ended. That sent me to Trump Wince Memes Turned One B-1 Flyover Into Instant Comedy, and somehow I finished on 27 Pete Hegseth Memes Cuz “Secretary Of Fart” Is A Thing Now, which explains itself.
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Phil M., Co‑Founder & Content Strategist
Phil is one of Thunder Dungeon’s co‑founders, doubling as our resident meme analyst and dark‑room brainstormer. He specializes in trend‑spotting across social platforms and shapes the editorial calendar to keep our galleries fresh, topical, and worthy of your valuable procrastination.
