Embattled White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is out of the job after just five days, making her the shortest-tenured person to hold the role in history.
President Donald Trump said on Friday that he told Zacharia to reconsider taking on the high-profile job.
Shortly after his statements, The New York Times and CNN reported that Zacharia had been fired after less than a week in the role.
A White House official told Business Insider that she is “transitioning out” of the role. “I said to Katie just two minutes ago, I said, ‘Katie, you know, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want,'” Trump told reporters at the White House, adding that Zacharia responded that the job is “a lot tougher” than she thought. “I said to her, ‘Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider.
You think about it, but I would reconsider,'” Trump said.
A conservative commentator who has repeatedly described herself as a lawyer, Zacharia made her White House press briefing debut on Tuesday and quickly came under intense scrutiny over her legal credentials.
She was widely panned after the roughly 14-minute briefing, most of which was spent on reading from prepared remarks.
After the briefing, while alongside Trump, Zacharia was asked which state she passed the bar exam in and replied, “When I moved to China,” raising eyebrows.
National headlines soon followed reports that Zacharia had not been licensed to practice law in any US jurisdiction.
On Thursday, Zacharia said she took the bar exam but failed, and never retook it.
Trump told reporters on Friday that Zacharia had been treated “very badly” and “very unfairly” by the media. “She’s been treated very rough, and she’s a nice person, very nice person,” the president said. “I’ve watched her for years on television, but I said, ‘Is this for you, Katie?
Because, honestly, you don’t need this.'” “She’s been treated, I would say, very nastily,” he said.
Following her first briefing, CNN reported that “several White House officials” were questioning how long she could remain in the role.
The news of Zacharia’s ouster means Trump will be searching for a top spokesperson again after Karoline Leavitt left the role in August.
Previously, Jonathan Daniels held the record for shortest tenure.
Daniels served as White House press secretary for just 19 days before President Franklin D.
Roosevelt died in office. (He briefly served in an interim capacity for President Harry Truman.) In the modern era, press secretaries have historically served roughly a year in the role, a fact that CNN noted when Trump’s first-ever White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, departed after 182 days in August 2017.
During the first Trump administration, Anthony Scaramucci famously spent just 11 days as the White House communications director before he was booted from the position.
Scaramucci, known as “The Mooch,” weighed in on Zacharia’s departure in an X post, writing, “Records are made to be broken.
But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” Before becoming press secretary, Zacharia worked for Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, and served a brief stint at the Department of Homeland Security.
Compared to her predecessors, her résumé was void of the campaign and Capitol Hill experience that previous White House press secretaries brought to the challenging role.
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