At last, we have the inside story on the short-term (five days, half a Scaramucci) of former White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia. She was struggling with an embarrassing first performance and misstatements about her lawyer status (she graduated law school, but there’s no record of her ever passing a state bar exam). That’s when her handling of a rumor doomed her brief time in office.

A vicious rumor had been circulating for hours that President Trump had been caught telling the truth. A nervous Zacharia stepped up to the press room lectern to speak to the assembled reporters.

“I want to assure all of you,” she bellowed, “that President Trump consistently delivers a forceful and reliably false account of the world from this podium as well as any other, including his posts on social media.”

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Enid Veracity, a reporter with Associated Press, interrupted her. “Katie,” said Veracity, “He wrote that Paris is the capital city of France. That’s a factually correct statement, something we almost never hear from him.”

Zacharia retorted, “President Trump repeatedly and emphatically delivers surprisingly compelling and decidedly false statements. That’s what you’ve come to expect from this administration, and we deliver every day and everywhere.”

Reuters reporter Guy Oblivious asked, “Has the president embarked on a new path where he occasionally challenges us by saying accurate things?”

“No,” insisted Zacharia, “President Trump remains who he always has been—a frenetic disassembler and serial fabulist with no ethical qualms about repeating falsehoods, sometimes the same ones dozens of times.”

“But he posted a factually correct sentence,” declared CBS reporter Will Buyitt.

Zacharia stood her ground. “He wrote that on Truth Social. We though it clear, the subtle humor of giving that name to the most antisocial collection of false blurts imaginable,” she stammered.

The White House aide then remembered her Roger Ailes training from her early career days at Fox News. One of the first rules was that when cornered lash out at the questioners.

“Look, it’s all your fault, anyway,” asserted Zacharia. “This is what you expect, even demand, from not only us but also every administration official from the Cabinet down to the lowest level operative, even our friends on the Supreme Court.”

“Where’s the Washington Post?” she asked. A reporter in the corner meekly raised his hand. “Your paper’s fact checker,” she continued, “had President Trump lying an average of 21 times a day. What did you do? You fired the fact checker. At the same time Facebook dropped fact checking entirely. You cover every presidential speech, chopper talk, and bit of Air Force One banter filled with whoppers. You almost never challenge anything; and put up with outrageous personal slurs against your female colleagues. Sometimes you even relay the lies with a straight face. Don’t tell us or the American people you don’t embrace our administration’s bold dismissal of silly norms about speaking truthfully.”

Zacharia stormed out of the press briefing room to the Oval Office. President Trump smiled and declared she was fired from the job of White House Press Secretary. “I can’t have anyone who is a better liar than me,” he declared.

Mark D. Harmon is a professor of journalism and media at the University of Tennessee. He recently won a National Press Club award for satirical column writing.