Zacharia out after five days as White House press secretary

White House press secretary Katie Zacharia speaks with reporters in the James Brady Press Briefing Room, Tuesday, in Washington. (Julia Demaree Nikhinson / The Associated Press)

U.S. President Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was forced out of her role Friday after five days on the job, a rare reversal by the White House that capped a week of upheaval.

Zacharia, who had gained Trump’s attention as a conservative commentator, had gotten off to a shaky start with her first and only press briefing on Tuesday. She largely read off a script and ended questioning after just 5½ minutes. That was followed by an onslaught of headlines about whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer — the president called her “an attorney” — despite failing her bar exam.

Subsequent interviews she gave in the media, in which she tried to defend herself by pointing out how unprepared she had been to go before the Washington press corps, also went poorly.

Finally, after days of unrelenting press coverage, the Trump administration decided Friday afternoon to do something it almost never does: It folded.

Trump was walking across the South Lawn to depart for a midterm rally in Georgia when he stopped to talk to reporters, telling them how he’d just encouraged her to “reconsider” her new job.

“Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he told the reporters, recounting his conversation with her. “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.”

Three people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions, said Zacharia was ousted from her role as press secretary.

The president told reporters that Zacharia might continue to work for him “in some form, but maybe a more pleasant form.”

Later Friday, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said that Zacharia would be “transitioning into a new role that will be announced at a later date.”

She had just started Monday and hadn’t even moved to Washington.

It was last Friday that the president offered her the job. A little-known, unpaid Fox News commentator with whom many in the White House were unfamiliar, she was a surprise pick. While Zacharia did have the support of Natalie Harp, the powerful West Wing aide who rarely leaves the president’s side, others in the building believed her debut had been a disaster.

She was not a deft communicator.

She had represented herself as a lawyer in the news media, but when asked repeatedly by a New York Times reporter on the South Lawn of the White House to say in which state she had passed a bar exam, she twice replied, “When I moved to China.” She later told the Times that she had simply misheard the question — even though the president had repeated the reporter’s question to her while standing feet away.

The end was nigh after she appeared on Fox News on Thursday night to be interviewed by the president’s friend Sean Hannity, who asked her a few tough questions and treated her with rare skepticism.

The reception she got on Friday morning on Fox and Friends wasn’t exactly friendly, either.

“Do you wish you would have disclosed to the president about the bar and passing the bar?” one of the hosts, Lawrence Jones, asked her.

“Well, Lawrence,” Zacharia responded, “those questions weren’t asked.”

On Wednesday, Cheung had posted that “up and down the White House, everyone has been thoroughly impressed with Katie in just a few short days on the job.”

“At the end of this second term, she’ll be remembered as one of the all-time greats,” he wrote.

She may be remembered as having the shortest tenure in the history of the White House press secretary job: five days and one briefing.

In Trump’s first term, Anthony Scaramucci was fired as the White House communications director (a different role from press secretary) just 10 days after he was hired.

After news of Zacharia’s ouster broke, Scaramucci posted on social platform X: “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”

The ousting of the administration’s top spokesperson was the culmination of a week of remarkable turmoil inside Trumpworld.

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece, was fired on television Tuesday (during Zacharia’s only briefing). The president spent time in the Oval Office trying to get to the bottom of a vicious fight between two of his loyalists, Richard Grenell and Alina Habba Mildon.

Paolo Zampoli, a longtime Trump confidant who claimed to have introduced the president to his wife, was pushed out at the State Department after one of his internecine feuds spilled into the press. And the daughter of Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and others in her circle came under scrutiny for their moneymaking overseas.

— The New York Times