And so Katie Zacharia joins the mayfly ranks of Liz Truss, Anthony Scaramucci, New Coke, CNN+ and Quibi. To say she burned twice as bright and half as long would be too kind. She went out like a firework on a soggy night.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Zacharia is leaving her role as press secretary after just five days on the job. No one was surprised after a lacklustre press briefing debut and scrutiny over her legal credentials.

But even more importantly, Zacharia lived by the sword and died in the one arena that Donald Trump truly cares about: television.

She reportedly got the job by closely monitoring the US president’s public schedule and tracked his active hours on Truth Social to predict exactly when he would be watching TV. She then timed her own appearances on air to make sure she caught his eye. The fact that she fitted the glossy blond aesthetic from what Trump calls “central casting” also helped.

But TV also proved her undoing. On Thursday, Zacharia gave a series of interviews to Trump-friendly outlets in a desperate bid for redemption. Instead, she sealed her own fate with more hapless performances.

She must have expected Fox News host Sean Hannity, who has even spoken at Trump rallies, to give her an easy ride. But even he was sceptical when she admitted she had “stepped up to the plate with very little prep time” for the first briefing. Hannity asked: “Am I hearing that you think the staff should have prepped you better?”

Zacharia rejected the notion that she had only taken questions from conservative outlets, incorrectly asserting that the Daily Mail is “not known to be a conservative outlet”. Hannity also quizzed her about her dubious legal credentials. “Why not just say, ‘I went to Pepperdine law school, and then took a different career path, and I took the bar once and didn’t pass?’”

Zacharia tried again on Fox & Friends but ran into host Lawrence Jones, who said: “You know, Katie, it’s been a tough week for you. It’s not an easy job to be the press secretary and you never want to be the story.”

He also asked: “Do you think you still have the confidence of the president?” Zacharia responded, “I’m standing here,” referring to the fact that she was speaking from the White House north lawn.

Her exit hours later was met with widespread ridicule – and a measure of human compassion for someone whom Trump had subjected to a very public humiliation.

Scaramucci, who lasted only 11 days as White House communications director during Trump’s first term, tweeted: “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

Joe Lockhart, a former White House press secretary under Bill Clinton, said in a phone interview: “It’s hard to generate sympathy for this woman, but there was no way for her to succeed. It takes years to be ready to do that job. Not days, not hours. I spent 20 years preparing for my first briefing from the very first campaign I did. It was very unfair for her, but very bad judgment on her part to think she could wander out there and smile.”

The fiasco was also a reminder of Trump’s woeful judgment as a manager whose chief criteria are looks and loyalty. During his 2015 presidential campaign, he promised that he would only hire “the best people”, comparing his future administration to corporate boardrooms. His first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after 23 days.

His second term has featured incompetents such as Kristi Noem, fired as homeland security secretary after multiple controversies, Robert F Kennedy Jr, a health secretary who spent years promoting anti-scientific claims about vaccine safety, and Pete Hegseth, a defence secretary who bungled the Iran war and announced a livestreamed execution only to be overruled by his boss.

Kurt Bardella, a political commentator, said: “It shows the limitations of the president making decisions like this based solely on, ‘oh, I liked watching this clip of her on this segment in the most friendly environment possible.’ We’ve seen this time and again with this president selecting figures for very meaningful, important and substantive positions solely based on cable news, and just look at how the war in Iran is going to know that ain’t working out too good.”

Trump also entrusted tech bro Elon Musk to take a chainsaw to the federal government. His choice of personnel has had damaging consequences for US institutions. The position of White House press secretary is the latest example.

Lockhart added: “It one more time shows how Trump cheapens everything he touches. He wants everything to be in his image. He tears down the East Wing. He puts his name on the Kennedy Center. Now he has tried to put someone in that job who reflects him, not the country and the values and the power of this country.

“He has cheapened another institution. I hold that room somewhat dear, and it’s sad to watch each of these things get remade in his image because he is cheap, tawdry, corrupt, and he has managed to make the United States reflect those values around the world rather than the ones we knew about for 250 years before him.”

Zacharia will survive and maybe thrive as a “former White House press secretary” in rightwing media, just as Scaramucci still makes the most of his “former” title. Meanwhile, the hunt is on, presumably, for a successor who can at least look reporters in the eye and not get into a tangle about their credentials.

But the cold truth is that the job of White House press secretary is superfluous when Trump is a word machine who holds two-hour campaign rallies, turns social media into a stream of consciousness and takes calls from reporters on his mobile phone. Playing the role of Trump’s spokesperson carries the inherent risk of inadvertently factchecking him.

“He’s certainly remade the job because all the press secretary does now is repeat what the president says and tell him how brilliant he was in saying it,” Lockhart concluded. “It used to be that credibility was the currency in the room. It’s impossible to be credible when you’re working for someone who lies almost every time he speaks.”