Former White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia stands behind President Donald Trump as he departs the White House in Washington, D.C., October 13, 2026. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
With her brief White House tenure in the rearview, a psychologist and body language expert explained the one specific moment it became clear that President Donald Trump would fire former press secretary Katie Zacharia.
Zacharia, a right-wing commentator and one-time advisor linked to Truth Social, lasted only five days as the White House Press Secretary before being pushed out of the office by Trump, who had reportedly pushed her for the role in the first place. This came after a disastrous, widely mocked first and only press briefing in which she took few questions and seemed to struggle with the basics of public speaking, as well as a scandal over her falsely claiming she was a lawyer.
Dr. John Paul Garrison is a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in reading body language, who also produces numerous videos using his professional expertise to analyse the behaviors of major public figures. In one of his latest videos from Friday, he dug into the situation surrounding Zacharia and pinpointed the "exact moment" he believes that her fate was sealed.
Garrison showed the widely circulated clip of Zacharia, standing behind Trump, being pressed by reporters about which state she passed the bar exam in, to which she claimed that she did so after moving to China. This claim immediately fell apart upon closer scrutiny, as non-citizens are not allowed to take China's certification exam for lawyers, and doing so would still not have made her a lawyer in the U.S.
During the exchange, Trump appeared to do a double-take while staring back at Zacharia while she made her claim about China, and this, Garrison argued, was the moment that her fate was sealed.
"That double take right there was the moment," Garrison said. "President Trump doesn't like surprises, and he doesn't like being embarrassed. And when she just said that, when they asked when she passed the bar, when she said it was when she went to China, that was it."
Garrison also examined Zacharia's behavior during an interview with Sean Hannity that came shortly before her White House departure, claiming that she used a "huge smile" to hide her real feelings.
"It's a very effective tool to hide how you actually feel because doing this and keeping the corners of your mouth up, not that hard to do," Garrison explained. "Now, obviously, there's no wrinkles next to her eyes, which is exactly how you'd see when somebody is actually feeling good or feeling happy. But you can see that her strategy, in order to give a specific impression for impression management, is to just maintain a smile whenever you're uncomfortable."
He later concluded: "The first day for every White House press secretary doesn't have to go incredibly well, but the disaster that we saw with Katie Zachariah made it very clear that this was not going to last long. Once the question started coming up about whether or not she was actually an attorney, because she had apparently used that word through tweets and so on and so forth, it seemed like it was really only a matter of time."