New Press Secretary Katie Zacharia Called Her Husband… What?!

This feels akin to a kid accidentally calling their teacher “mom.”

On Tuesday, new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia stood behind the podium at the White House for the very first time, and it was a mess.

Karoline Leavitt’s successor made an unpolished debut that lasted about 14 minutes, mostly spent looking down as she read from a prepared statement, anxiously playing with her hair and stumbling over her words.

At the tail end of her press conference, however, she had one moment that was significantly more cringe-inducing than anything that preceded it.

It began when Zacharia was asked how she manages being a working mother of four kids.

“Well, first of all, I want to give my husband an amazing shout-out,” Zacharia began. “We have four kids ranging from [ages] 12, 10, 8 and 6 — three of them are boys, so we have a handful.”

She then tried to explain that her husband and children were in Washington, D.C., with her to celebrate a few family birthdays as a unit. That’s when her epic verbal slip-up emerged.

“I love being with my kids — the idea of not spending evenings with my kid, kids is completely unacceptable, so my president—or excuse me, my husband,” Zacharia said. She immediately recognized her mistake.

“Uh, that’s a good one,” she said nervously, then rambled a bit more before abruptly shutting down the press conference.