Complaint Filed Over White House Press Secretary's Legal Credentials
When a Press Secretary Gambles on Being a “Lawyer”
Katie Zacharia’s bar‑exam fiasco shows how a ruler’s servant can win the appearance of authority yet lose the substance that makes appearances hold.
Katie Zacharia walks into the press room less than a week into the job already carrying a lawsuit in miniature on her own head. A watchdog group has gone to the California bar, asking them to investigate her claims to be a lawyer. Fox’s Hannity presses her on air about calling herself an attorney despite not passing the exam. The New York Times says she admits failing the bar, yet still defends the label. This is not a scandal about money or treason. It is about titles. Titles seem light until you put the whole weight of a state’s message on them.
When I wrote *The Prince*, I said I would leave aside imagined republics and look to “the real truth of a matter,” as W. K. Marriott translates me. The effectual truth here is simple: Zacharia’s usefulness to her prince depends on whether others believe she speaks with knowledge and authority. She has worked in communications, in a law firm in Beijing, in international transaction work, according to an official. All that may be true and still not make her a lawyer. Yet in politics, men are moved less by the registry of professional orders than by their impression of competence and rank.
A press secretary’s first survival incentive is not moral hygiene; it is to maintain credibility sufficient to defend the regime’s line under fire. If calling herself a lawyer helped her overawe reporters, intimidate opponents, or reassure allies, then it followed her interest to do so. The question is not why she tried this, but whether she measured the risks. A claim that can be checked by a bar association is not like boasting of courage on a battlefield thirty years past. It is like forging a seal in a city full of notaries. Prudence means lying, when you must, in those corners where verification limps.
In *The Prince* I observed that men judge “more by the eye than by the hand,” which is to say by appearances more than reality. To parade as a lawyer is to borrow a costume that the crowd understands. It compresses a long story—exams, long nights, clients—into one word. For a time it increases one’s political capital. But appearances are a kind of currency that must be backed by reserves. When a complaint hits the bar, when a famous host questions you on air, when a major paper banners your failed exam, the spectacle flips. The same costume that once magnified you now makes you ridiculous. A naked man is pitied; a naked man discovered in borrowed armor is despised.
What I find most revealing is not the original inflation, but the partial retreat. According to the reports, Zacharia now admits failing the bar yet still defends calling herself a lawyer, explaining herself in a friendly interview by recalling the harried process that led to her hiring. This is the middle course I always warn against. If she had hard proof that her claims fit some technical definition, she should advance and crush the complaint, forcing her accusers to eat dust. If she lacked that proof, she should have retreated fully—confessing error, joking at her own expense, and throwing her fate on the people’s fondness for candor.
Instead she concedes just enough to confirm the wound but not enough to cleanse it. The watchdogs are encouraged, sensorious hosts are emboldened, and every future briefing is now held under a quiet cloud: is this another convenient label, or a fact? Severity and mercy work the same in reputations as in punishments. A leader who acts decisively, even harshly, at the first sign of disorder often wounds the few to save the many. One who spars lightly, explaining and trimming but never finishing, ends by suffering continual pinpricks that together bleed him white. Half‑measures multiply enemies without securing friends.
For a prince, such an episode is not trivial, because it teaches his court how seriously he treats truth in his own house. If a central voice of the regime appears to play loosely with a simple professional claim, and if correction is hesitant and politic, others learn that narrative outranks accuracy. In the *Discourses* I praised peoples who, when they saw beginnings of corruption, returned at once to first principles. Here the first principle is plain: a state that depends on words cannot afford to have its chief scribe caught bargaining with the dictionary. The times will forgive many sins, but rarely the spectacle of a ruler’s servant pretending to a rank she cannot prove.
The uncertainty remains how this story ends. Perhaps the bar finds no violation, the public shrugs, and the government marches on; perhaps each new controversy revives the old doubt until fortune presents a pretext to replace her. I do not know. I know only the rule: when your power rests on speech, you must either match your titles to your merits, or possess such overwhelming virtù that you can compel men to believe the titles anyway. Whoever lacks both should not play games with names.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Appearances are a hard currency of power: most people judge by the eyes rather than the hands, by results rather than processes. Analyze reputation, ceremony, and narrative as assets on the balance sheet, not as decoration.
- The Prince — Ask what the actor's survival incentives are before asking what morality requires: a leader's first imperative is to maintain the state, and you must expect them to do what maintenance demands. The interesting question is whether they do it skilfully.