The wheels are flying off the wagon

Today, for regular or occasional readers of this column, and for those of you tuning in for the first time, I only have only one request. Before reading any further, please put your partisanship on hold.

Forget about politics for the moment and consider shocking cases of mismanagement we saw last week alone from the Trump White House between Oct. 11 and Oct. 18. The facts do not lie.

First, President Trump himself named Katie Zacharia the new White House press secretary. She gave one disastrous 15-minute press briefing. She lasted all of five days. Trump has no one to blame but himself.

Unlike other potential candidates, during the two months since former press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced she was stepping down, Zacharia was never interviewed or vetted for the job. She called herself a lawyer, which she’s not. She flunked her bar exam. She also had no prior journalism experience, other than occasional appearances on Fox News. For Trump, that was enough to give her the job — reportedly over the objections of chief of staff Susie Wiles. One major self-inflicted embarrassment.

Second, reportedly over the objections of top staffers, Trump announced his support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s plan to publicly televise the firing squad execution of 2009 Fort Hood shooter and former U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan. It would be, he wrote on Truth Social, “a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America........

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