Trump's New Spokeswoman Claimed the Abortion Pill Came From the Nazis' Gas Chambers

The White House has a new voice. Katie Zacharia, 42, previously a communications adviser in Trump's political circles, will now represent the administration before the press. Among the claims she has publicly spread is that the abortion pill came straight out of Hitler's extermination camps. The woman who is now supposed to explain to the country what the administration is doing has spread a fabricated story about the Holocaust.

Last fall, she linked the drug mifepristone online to the manufacturer of Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the camps during World War II. The chain she drew led through the company Degesch, in which the chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben held a 42.5 percent stake and occupied 5 of the 11 seats on its supervisory board. I.G. Farben, which she called the "Devil's Chemist," had manufactured the gas for the gas chambers, exploited more than 35,000 forced laborers, many of them from Auschwitz, and even built its own camp to exploit them more efficiently. Where she got this idea is impossible to determine. She presented it as a sought-after guest on television, long before the White House came calling.

"Sitting on the board of Seth Gruber's White Rose is really just a continuation of my passion for helping him break through the culture war, so to speak, and get right to the heart of it, you know, to the efforts to depopulate through abortion, to the racist roots of abortion. You know, the abortion pill contains the same chemicals that they used in the extermination, you know, in the extermination camps in Nazi Germany to stop the flow of progesterone and cut off oxygen to the baby, right? Those are the same chemicals they used back then. And so, for me, it's just a tremendous blessing and a gift to serve on this board and work side by side with a culture warrior like him." (November 2025)

On camera, she went even further. She described sitting on the board of Seth Gruber's group "White Rose" as a continuation of her passion for breaking through the culture war and getting to the "heart of it," to "depopulation through abortion" and the "racist roots of abortion." The abortion pill, she claimed, contained "the same chemicals" used in Nazi Germany's extermination camps to stop the flow of progesterone and cut off oxygen to the baby. She considered it a blessing to work side by side with such a culture warrior.

The name of her group makes the whole thing even darker. The White Rose was the group of students around the Scholl siblings whom the Nazi regime had beheaded in 1943 for their resistance. A campaign borrows that name while a woman on its board drags the gas chambers into a pamphlet against a pill. The memory of those who were murdered, harnessed to the very cause they died resisting.

The facts tell a different story. Mifepristone was developed in France by the pharmaceutical company Roussel-Uclaf and approved there in 1988. The entire connection Zacharia suggested consists of a chain of corporate takeovers spanning decades. Pharmaceutical giant Sanofi eventually swallowed the successors of the company that once manufactured Zyklon B and also acquired Roussel-Uclaf in the late 1990s. Having a common owner generations later does not establish an origin. The claim of a direct line from Nazi Germany does not hold up. It is false.

The method behind it is older than her career. Linking abortion to Auschwitz eliminates the need for any argument. All that remains is the accusation. A medical and legal question becomes mass murder, and the other side becomes a gang of executioners. Zacharia spoke of "depopulation" and "racist roots," the stock vocabulary of a movement that suspects a plan for extermination behind the right to abortion. The image of gas chambers shuts down the debate before it even begins, and anyone who objects automatically finds themselves pushed dangerously close to the perpetrators

The dead pay dearly for this. Turning the 6 million murdered Jews into a rhetorical club strips their memory of its gravity and passes them around as props at a podium. The woman who spoke this way will soon speak for an entire country, including its Jewish citizens and the many women who have taken this pill. She branded them all with the mark of the camps, casually, as a means to an end. A memory carried as a weapon grows dull until nothing sacred remains in it.

From a podium, the same claim carries more weight. What was once just the bizarre obsession of a commentator posting online takes on the seal of the government when delivered from the White House lectern. The reporters sitting across from her will then have to decide whether to let such a lie slide or challenge it every single time. That is exactly what this choice is aimed at. A spokeswoman who arrives in office already peddling this nonsense pushes the boundaries of what can be said in the name of the United States before she has spoken her first real word.

Her career shows just how arbitrary the convictions beneath her résumé really are. Before joining the White House, she advised the company behind Trump's social network Truth Social and was a constant presence on conservative television panels. Before that, she worked for Fix California, founded by Trump confidant Ric Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence. Between February and March, she served for a few weeks under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, attacked Senator Richard Blumenthal over his criticism of ICE raids at airports, and praised the agency's arrests as "heroic" actions against "criminal illegal predators." The same woman, fresh out of Pepperdine's law school in 2012 and 2013, raised money for a charity that helped the children of migrant workers. What she once did for migrant children has now turned into applause for raids against their parents, and her convictions change with the weather of her career.

This administration isn't looking for someone to explain things at its podium. It's looking for a fighter. Zacharia comes from television, and her predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, went the opposite way in August, leaving the podium for a television network's cameras. There is barely any difference left between the studio and the podium. Both sell, neither asks questions. Moving from the screen to the White House microphone means bringing along the habit of letting volume replace scrutiny and allowing the strongest image to win, rather than the truest one.

What she inherits is an administration practically drowning in scandals. It stands accused of working to benefit governments close to Moscow and inviting Iran to fire on American cities. Add to that propaganda paid for with taxpayer money and $810 million in funds appropriated by Congress that the White House cut, illegally in the view of critics. She is now supposed to sell all of this to the country as business as usual.

The job of a spokeswoman is to stand between the public and the truth and let the truth through. This spokeswoman takes office having already trafficked in a falsified past, and her first sales pitch was the outrageous demand that a fabricated Holocaust story be treated as an acceptable opinion. Making a fabrication your spokeswoman means no longer fearing the truth because you've already replaced it. A government reveals what it thinks of the truth by the mouth it chooses to speak for it.