President Donald Trump’s new press secretary has a history of spreading misinformation, from election denialism to an extreme claim linking the abortion pill mifepristone to Nazi concentration camps.
Katie Zacharia was named White House press secretary on Friday, filling the role vacated by Karoline Leavitt, who left the role at the end of August.
When not busy with her frequent appearances on conservative television, including Fox News and Newsmax, the 41-year-old blonde MAGA commentator has been a rabid poster on social media, where she defends Trump and blasts his enemies.
But she has also promoted an outlandish argument attempting to tie the abortion pill directly to Nazi Germany and concentration camps, as captured in a recently resurfaced clip:
In November 2025, Zacharia posted on X about the claim, similar to ones used by right-wing anti-abortion activists.
She wrote, “Mifepristone, formerly called RU-486, is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
She continued, “Zyklon-B was originally used as a pesticide and marketed by the German Corporation for Pest Control, now known as Detia Degesch GmbH. Degesch, in which German chemical company I.G. Farben had a 42.5% interest and on whose board of 11 it had five seats, was the sole producer of the gas.”
“According to the New York Times, ‘I.G. Farben played so important a role in Hitler’s war machine and in the Holocaust that it came to be called “the devil’s chemist.” It manufactured Zyklon B, the gas-chamber poison, among many other products, and its factories exploited more than 35,000 slave labourers, many from Auschwitz. It even built a concentration camp of its own to improve efficiency,’” Zacharia posted.
It’s not exactly clear where she came up with her conspiracy theory tying RU-486 to Zyklon B and concentration camps.
RU-486, which is known generically as mifepristone, is a synthetic steroid medication invented in the 1980s by a French pharmaceutical company, Roussel-Uclaf.
The name comes from an abbreviation for the company plus a serial number, as noted by Britannica.
It was approved for use in 1988. Meanwhile, the gas Zyklon B used in death camps was provided by Degesch, a subsidiary of I.G. Farben, which later evolved into the German chemical company Hoechst, according to Britannica.
While Roussel-Uclaf was acquired by Hoechst AG, that did not happen until 1997, nearly a decade after RU-486 was approved for use. Mifepristone was approved for use in the U.S. by the FDA in 2000.
Not only is its creation attributed to the French company, but French biochemist Étienne-Émile Baulieu is credited specifically as the “father” of the abortion pill for his work on RU-486. He was born in France and was a member of the French Resistance during the war before attending school to become a physician.
Zacharia has also promoted Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, even invoking the death of a National Guard soldier to attack former President Joe Biden.
In a December 2025 post on X, Zacharia responded to a White House tribute to Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, who was fatally shot while serving in Washington, D.C.
“The price of a stolen 2020 election and subsequent autopen presidency is American Blood,” she wrote, adding, “RIP 🕊️.”
But Beckstrom had been deployed to the nation’s capital in August 2025 as part of Trump’s own National Guard operation, months after Biden left office. She was shot on Nov. 26 and died the following day. There is no evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, and Zacharia offered no evidence connecting Biden’s presidency to Beckstrom’s killing.
Zacharia, who was named White House press secretary on Friday, previously served in the Trump administration as spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security from February to March 2026.
