At one o’clock in the afternoon on her fifth day in office, she was sitting in her office in the West Wing of the White House, telling a Wall Street Journal reporter about her plans for the job and saying there would be no personnel changes on her team. Forty minutes later, someone knocked on the door and said the vice president wanted to chat for a couple of minutes. She got up and went out. She never came back.
Katie Zakaria, White House press secretary, lasted five days. Five days. The previous shortest record was ten days, Anthony Scaramucci. The American media simply started using her name as a unit of time: one Zakaria, even shorter than one Scaramucci.
On October 9, Trump announced the appointment on Truth Social. On the 13th, she held her first press briefing. That briefing started at eleven. It was over in about ten minutes. For the first eight minutes, she kept her head down and read from the script, thanking the president and reciting his achievements on tax cuts, energy, and tariffs. Then for another five or six minutes, she took questions from three conservative-leaning outlets. In the middle, she referred to “my husband” as “my president.”
Most people remember that slip of the tongue. A slip like that can be deadly. But what really brought her down was another word: lawyer. When Trump announced the appointment, he said she was a lawyer. On the 15th, on a Fox program, she admitted that after graduating from law school in 2011, she had taken the California bar exam, failed, and had never obtained a license to practice in the United States. The requirement was written right there in the first line of her résumé. And that line was blank. No matter what came after, it couldn’t make up for it.
CNN later quoted a White House adviser as saying, “Did she even get vetted?” and, even more bluntly, “What the hell is she doing?” Put those two lines together and the problem clearly wasn’t just her. What the White House wanted was someone who could stand in front of the cameras and take bullets for the president, with loyalty first and vetting somewhere later. Yet she had only been notified the day before taking office, and the briefing book didn’t arrive until that same morning. Less than twenty-four hours to prepare. Not even a full day.
The Partnership for Public Service has a statistic: as of September, Trump’s second term had already seen 934 political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation leave office, more than twice the number under Biden or Obama over the same period, and 58 percent higher than in his first term. Over the four years of his first term, he cycled through four chiefs of staff, four national security advisers, and four press secretaries. And now this position is still empty. The White House says there’s no rush.
A country’s official message, in the end, rests on one mouth. She says one sentence, and exchange rates can move and markets can jump. The numbers on the screen can reverse overnight. But that mouth is very easy to call away: at one o’clock she was still talking about plans, and forty minutes later she was gone. Would you bet your position size on one mouth?
On-chain systems handle the other half of the same problem. Protocols don’t care who said it; they care about signatures. A multisig address needs three people to agree before funds can move, and an oracle needs weighted quotes from several independent sources to count. Lose one source, and the price is still there. The transfer still goes through. People are single points of failure; signatures are redundancy. So whenever something goes wrong, the first reaction is to check exactly how many people are signing that address. Then deal with the rest. After all, on-chain, you can verify it.
No successor has been announced yet, and whether the post will stay empty until the midterm elections on November 3 is anyone’s guess. What has already spread, though, is the phrase “one Zakaria.” From now on, anyone who does this job will have to think carefully about how long they can last.
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#币安广场 #加密市场 #oracle
Katie Zakaria, White House press secretary, lasted five days. Five days. The previous shortest record was ten days, Anthony Scaramucci. The American media simply started using her name as a unit of time: one Zakaria, even shorter than one Scaramucci.
On October 9, Trump announced the appointment on Truth Social. On the 13th, she held her first press briefing. That briefing started at eleven. It was over in about ten minutes. For the first eight minutes, she kept her head down and read from the script, thanking the president and reciting his achievements on tax cuts, energy, and tariffs. Then for another five or six minutes, she took questions from three conservative-leaning outlets. In the middle, she referred to “my husband” as “my president.”
Most people remember that slip of the tongue. A slip like that can be deadly. But what really brought her down was another word: lawyer. When Trump announced the appointment, he said she was a lawyer. On the 15th, on a Fox program, she admitted that after graduating from law school in 2011, she had taken the California bar exam, failed, and had never obtained a license to practice in the United States. The requirement was written right there in the first line of her résumé. And that line was blank. No matter what came after, it couldn’t make up for it.
CNN later quoted a White House adviser as saying, “Did she even get vetted?” and, even more bluntly, “What the hell is she doing?” Put those two lines together and the problem clearly wasn’t just her. What the White House wanted was someone who could stand in front of the cameras and take bullets for the president, with loyalty first and vetting somewhere later. Yet she had only been notified the day before taking office, and the briefing book didn’t arrive until that same morning. Less than twenty-four hours to prepare. Not even a full day.
The Partnership for Public Service has a statistic: as of September, Trump’s second term had already seen 934 political appointees who do not require Senate confirmation leave office, more than twice the number under Biden or Obama over the same period, and 58 percent higher than in his first term. Over the four years of his first term, he cycled through four chiefs of staff, four national security advisers, and four press secretaries. And now this position is still empty. The White House says there’s no rush.
A country’s official message, in the end, rests on one mouth. She says one sentence, and exchange rates can move and markets can jump. The numbers on the screen can reverse overnight. But that mouth is very easy to call away: at one o’clock she was still talking about plans, and forty minutes later she was gone. Would you bet your position size on one mouth?
On-chain systems handle the other half of the same problem. Protocols don’t care who said it; they care about signatures. A multisig address needs three people to agree before funds can move, and an oracle needs weighted quotes from several independent sources to count. Lose one source, and the price is still there. The transfer still goes through. People are single points of failure; signatures are redundancy. So whenever something goes wrong, the first reaction is to check exactly how many people are signing that address. Then deal with the rest. After all, on-chain, you can verify it.
No successor has been announced yet, and whether the post will stay empty until the midterm elections on November 3 is anyone’s guess. What has already spread, though, is the phrase “one Zakaria.” From now on, anyone who does this job will have to think carefully about how long they can last.
$BTC $LINK $USDC
#币安广场 #加密市场 #oracle