White House Chaos and a Tilt to Moscow Test Europe's Resolve

Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after less than a week in the job. A White House official told AFP she was “transitioning” out of the role. Several US outlets, including The New York Times, reported she had been fired. President Donald Trump denied dismissing her. He said instead that she had been “brutalized by the media,” and that he’d told her minutes earlier: “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

The sequence matters less as gossip than as a signal of how Washington is being run just as Europe is being asked to plan around it.

A Short Tenure, A Long Shadow

Zacharia’s first briefing, on Tuesday, lasted under 15 minutes. She listed what she described as Trump’s achievements and took three questions. Scrutiny quickly turned to her credentials. She had described herself as a lawyer while working as a commentator for conservative outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax. She holds a law degree from a California university, but she hadn’t passed the bar exam, generally required to practise law in the United States.

On Thursday, she acknowledged as much, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity, a close Trump ally, that she had never retaken the exam. “It was never my intent to go into the practice of law,” she said. In a separate interview with the pro-Trump outlet Real America’s Voice, she said she had registered for the exam but became “distracted and overwhelmed” by plans to move to China with her husband. She added that “many people in the field” had told her she could “label myself a lawyer” because she had a law degree.

Europe’s Question Mark

The churn at the podium comes against a harder strategic backdrop. Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves assessed Washington’s shifting approach to Russia’s war on Ukraine and its implications for European security. He argued that the Trump administration’s apparent rapprochement with Moscow was partly shaped by domestic electoral calculations.

Ilves put the burden squarely on Europeans. The question, he said, is whether the continent can build political unity, strategic independence and military capabilities to defend its own interests. “If there’s any time for Europe to begin to act as Europe and not as being strictly self-interested, then this is the time for it,” he said.

He also challenged the assumption that Washington holds overwhelming leverage over Kyiv. He pointed to Europe’s growing financial commitment to Ukrainian defence, and to the possible domestic political costs for the United States of withdrawing intelligence support.

Fault Lines Inside the Union

Ilves didn’t spare Europe’s own divisions. He described nationalist movements, competing security priorities and differing attitudes toward Russia as factors fragmenting the continent and weakening its capacity for collective action. His warning was blunt.

“If we don’t take that issue seriously,” he said, “I fear we will have far more vociferous tendencies within the European Union between those that take the security side of this seriously and those countries or leaders that will block progress simply for their domestic audiences.”

A Kyiv Independent video featuring historian and journalist Anne Applebaum raised a related point. It asked why Russian President Vladimir Putin was pushing Trump to stop Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries. Applebaum argued the attacks were putting real pressure on Moscow, and that Trump’s approach risked handing Russia more time to continue its war against Ukraine. The page provided no further transcript of her remarks.

Why This Matters: A press office that can’t keep its principal spokesperson for a week is a poor foundation for a stable transatlantic partnership. For Ukrainians living under bombardment, the stakes of Washington’s drift toward Moscow aren’t abstract. They’re measured in time Russia gains to continue its war.

Ilves’s argument is that Europe can’t wait for clarity from the White House. It has to supply its own: unity, capability and the political will to resist leaders who block collective action for domestic applause. That’s a test for EU institutions and member-state governments alike, and the cost of failing it would fall first on Ukrainian civilians, then on the security of the whole continent.