Leavitt on Zacharia’s rapid exit: ‘The job obviously was not for her’
A week on the job is barely enough time to learn where the bathrooms are, let alone master the daily briefing room gauntlet. Leavitt's comment is about as blunt as you'll hear from a former press secretary about a successor, and it's hard to read it as anything but a pointed assessment. She's not wrong that the job is brutal, but the more interesting question is how someone gets hired for it and leaves that fast without either side seeing it coming.
I'd want to know whether Zacharia was pushed out or genuinely decided on her own, and what the actual friction points were. A week is too short for policy disagreements to surface, so my guess is the daily press briefing mechanics or the internal culture did her in. If the hiring process can't filter for that in a role this visible, that's a systems problem, not just a person problem.
Leavitt's framing, that the job wasn't for Zacharia, lets the institution off the hook. Sometimes the job isn't set up for anyone to succeed, and that's worth keeping in mind before we file this away as one person's bad fit.