CONSPIRACY PROMOTER

Trump’s New Press Secretary Busted Peddling Bonkers Nazi Claim

The new White House press secretary spread a conspiracy about the abortion pill.

President Donald Trump’s new press secretary has a history of spreading whoppers, including an extreme take about the origins of the abortion pill mifepristone.

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 42-year-old blond 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.

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.

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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, who was named White House press secretary on Friday, had previously served for a short stint in the Trump administration as spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security from February to March 2026.

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Sarah Ewall-WicePolitical Reporter

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