Does Trump's White House have a woman problem?

Tina Brown (0:02)

This is a Global Production.

Christiane Amanpour (0:04)

What about the White House? Is it a fit place for women? All these resignations, all these sort of collapse of women cabinet secretaries and now press officials.

Tina Brown (0:14)

Katie Zacharia was a kind of animatronic airhead. I don't know where Trump could have possibly imagined she could have ever fit in as any kind of public spokesman. She really was just an avatar for all of the terrible appointments. And being a woman just makes you fall faster and harder and with more sort of velocity and embarrassment.

Christiane Amanpour (0:33)

All these people who are getting the chop or falling on their sword or just committing harikiri are women. And it does pain me because gosh, damn it, we really work so hard to get to where we belong. And then all this happened.

Tina Brown (0:48)

He makes everything debased, degraded and irrelevant. The proud role of being a press secretary has now become a joke job like everything else that he does, because in the end Trump is trying to say no one is important except me.

Christiane Amanpour (1:06)

Hello everyone. It's Christiane Amanpour with the Ex Files and joining me is Tina Brown, Ex Vanity Fair editor. Hi there. You're in London. I'm in London, but we're on opposite sides of the city. So we're going to take on two issues today, right, Tina? What about the White House? Is it a fit place for women?

All these resignations, all these sort of collapse of women cabinet secretaries and now press officials. Plus, we're going to talk about how did Trump get this way. Perhaps there's some evidence for us in Roy Cohn, who is his mentor, and we're going to be interviewing Kai Bird, who's a journalist and author in his latest book. He's called American Scoundrel about Roy Cohn. So Tina, let's get started about the latest crisis. Look, there I just looked at an article today, an opinion really, never underestimate the power of misogyny to gear up the far right.

So my question to you is, do you think that comes into, for instance, the fall of Katie Zacharia, the collapse of a lot of the press, not just press secretaries, but the female cabinet secretaries over the last several months?

Tina Brown (2:16)

Well, look, I mean, the fact is that Katie Zacharia was a kind of animatronic airhead. I don't know where Trump could have possibly imagined she could have ever fit in as any kind of public spokesman. So let's just set that aside in the sense that she was sort of almost uniquely ridiculous in her presentation. Trump just snatched her out of Fox News. He didn't ask anyone's opinion before he appointed her, including his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

She was completely unqualified. Had six weeks as an assistant spokesperson for another department.

She claimed she was a lawyer. In fact, she wasn't. She'd just gone to law school. So this was a whole sort of host of horribleness.

But the truth is, is that she really was just an avatar for all of the terrible appointments. Being a woman just makes you fall faster and harder, and with more sort of velocity and embarrassment. I think that is genuinely the part of it. But when you think about it, I mean, there was a great scene actually in The Wonderful Book Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swann, which talks about how the very beginning of Trump's term, he had a session of choosing cabinet appointments with Howard Lutnick, who was then the transition secretary.

And Lutnick just put out on these TV screens all of these pictures of people. And Trump was choosing his cabinet like a casting session for American Idol. When the picture of John Ratcliffe came up, he said, that's great. He can be, I love him for the CIA director. He looks like Cary Grant. He said, if you were in a central casting, you would cast this guy. He looks like Cary Grant. So this is how Trump makes his decision. So if you are choosing cabinet people purely on the basis of their looks, choosing major figures in the government purely by their looks, ultimately, you're going to go for the most ridiculous end of it of all, which was to appoint Katie Zacharia.

Christiane Amanpour (4:11)

And throw her out into her first public briefing with barely any preparation. I mean, you hear from the others, her predecessors, that they have months of preparation to actually do this, or at least weeks, you know.

The very funny comment from Scaramucci, who basically said, records are meant to be broken. I take no joy in saying that Katie last even less than I did. She was apparently five days, he was the famous 11 days. But it also begs a much bigger question. What are they saying from the podium? Just this weekend, Donald Trump did what some might say, election interference. He called on Israelis to vote for Bibi Netanyahu, saying that that would be the best partner for the United States and the best for Israel, as Bibi Netanyahu is having a very, very hard time in the polls. He's called a Michigan Democratic Senate candidate, Abdul El Sayed, the Egyptian American, a jihadist. I mean, all this stuff is happening almost sort of like, as we say in the business, verbal diarrhea, and there's nobody really able to pass it or talk about it. I mean, for whatever people thought about Carolyn Levit, I think she will stand out as somebody who served the administration exceptionally well. She was quick on her feet. She was knowledgeable.