We’ve come a long way since Jordan Peele’s 2018 PSA warning about the future of political deepfakes. Back then, everyone assumed that AI-faked video would mostly be the work of nefarious outside actors. Today, a remarkable chunk of the political ecosystem has openly embraced them, particularly on the right. The New York Times reports today that candidates and PACs, predominantly Republican ones, have already spent more than $137 airing AI-generated ads this year alone. About 70 percent of the ads, they found, “contained no disclaimer that AI was used.” Happy Friday.

Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.

Post-Truth Press Secretary

by Andrew Egger

The new White House press secretary doesn’t have the one skill Trump’s top flack needs. She just can’t lie good.

Katie Zacharia’s first few days on the job have become dominated by her halting, changing responses to accusations that she spent years falsely claiming to be a lawyer, even though she has never been admitted to the bar in any state and never practiced law. Asked Tuesday when she had passed the bar, she replied “when I went to China.” On Wednesday, she insisted she had misheard the question and had thought she was simply asking what she had done after law school.

Then, yesterday, she did a damage-control tour of conservative media, sitting for interviews with Fox News’s Sean Hannity and MAGA conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. She insisted in these interviews that legal experts had assured her she could call herself a “lawyer” so long as she never used the (she said) more specific term “attorney.”

This is a silly dodge: In America, “lawyer” and “attorney” are synonyms. And it’s not a good excuse either: CNN promptly found at least fifteen times since last year that Zacharia had shared posts describing her as an “attorney.”

Katie Zacharia’s job is to lie to you. Our job is to tell you the truth—about the world, the state of our country, and what we really think. Join us.

Even Hannity, far from giving her the softball primetime interview she plainly had hoped for, struck a prickly, skeptical tone last night: “Why get into this long, drawn-out thing about the difference between a lawyer and an attorney?” he asked. He then asked her point-blank about the CNN “attorney” report. “I think they were retweets,” Zacharia blustered, “and I corrected the record and said that I was not endorsing the title, they were retweets of a title that had been given.” As Judd Legum, who broke the story of Zacharia’s resume embellishment, pointed out, she shared one of these tweets just last week.

None of this, of course, reflects particularly well on Zacharia’s honesty and character. Just as importantly, it is terrible comms work. Being able to navigate through stories like this in a disciplined, low-drama way is the single most important requirement for her new job.¹ But instead of competently smothering the story, she has prolonged it, her multiple ridiculous “explanations,” each debunked faster than the last, just dragging out the embarrassment.

Put another way: Zacharia’s dishonesty isn’t the reason her job is in trouble. Being dishonest without seeming to is a big part of the job! The problem isn’t that she’s a liar, it’s that she’s a bad liar. Neither Hannity or Trump or anybody in MAGA cares that she lied on her résumé. What they care about is her clumsiness in explaining that now. Because a person who can’t even wriggle out of a little lie like that is going to get completely tangled when it comes time to defend way bigger whoppers in the White House briefing room.

Recall here that Trump picked Zacharia for the job on gut instinct, after seeing her appearances on TV. He made the choice over the objections of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who thought that CNN commentator Scott Jennings—a truly seasoned, deft liar—would be the superior choice.

“I would not be surprised if he happened to be meeting with her and just decided right then and there to give her the job, without much input or vetting,” Stephanie Grisham, one of Trump’s first-term press secretaries, told me.

Some in the White House who have chafed at Wiles’s leadership were enthused about the move: “Susie wanted someone who would be loyal to her and instead Trump chose someone loyal to him, as it should be,” an administration source told the Daily Mail this week. “He is taking back control, and it is starting to feel more like the first term.” (No argument there.)

What Trump wants and what Trump needs from the people around him aren’t always the same thing. Trump picked Zacharia because she’s a sycophant in his preferred mold. And he thinks she fights hard. But there’s a difference between fighting hard and fighting well. A press secretary who can’t lie convincingly won’t cut it.

A Tip of the Cap to No Kings

by William Kristol

Earlier this week, I asked if a reinvigorated liberalism is possible. I think it is, and urged us to “look abroad,” at the examples of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Péter Magyar, Mark Carney, and Pope Leo XIV, all admirably “strong and confident defenders of liberty.”

And I added,

But you know what else gives me hope for a revitalized liberalism? The American people, or at least an increasing percentage of them. Seeing support for President Trump collapse among the public—with very little help from our pitifully complacent and fearful elites—is heartening. Even inspiring.

And tomorrow, it will be inspiring to once again see millions of Americans show up at No Kings rallies. Because before the polls changed, before the gradual move of the public away from Trump, there were the efforts of the No Kings organizers. There were the peaceful and patriotic demonstrations of the participants. Before it was fashionable, No Kings was there.

The first of the No Kings demonstrations, on June 14, 2025, was organized in response to Trump’s military march in Washington that he’d timed—monarchically—