Trump Presses White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia to Quit

Katie Zacharia is no longer the White House press secretary after serving less than five days in that role. A senior official inside the administration told the Daily Mail that she was transitioning out of the position on Friday. Just before this move, Donald Trump spoke to reporters at the White House and said he had asked her to consider quitting.

You don't have to do this if you don't want to, Trump stated he told Zacharia. Honestly if I were you I'd reconsider, he added. Maybe it's not for her, he noted regarding her fit for the job. When directly asked if he would fire her, Trump responded that he wants her to have a good life instead of forcing her out officially.

Her tenure has been rocky from the start following a fourteen-minute debut briefing that drew heavy criticism for her nervous stature on camera. It comes after revelations that she never passed the bar exam after graduating from Pepperdine Law School despite describing herself as an attorney during her press duties. Her time in this specific post is now shorter than Anthony Scaramucci's famously brief eleven days as White House communications director in 2017. She previously only lasted six weeks as a communications adviser at Homeland Security earlier this year before moving to the White House.

Trump named Zacharia to the post on October 9 to replace Karoline Leavitt, who stepped down in August after about nineteen months as press secretary. The president made the decision to hire her during a seventy-two-hour period last week without consulting his chief of staff Susie Wiles, the Daily Mail previously reported. Before joining the White House, Zacharia was a senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group. She spent two months earlier this year as a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.

Her debut briefing on Tuesday lasted just fourteen minutes and allowed questions from only three reporters. Leavitt's briefings averaged about forty-five minutes in comparison. When reporters asked that day where she had passed the bar, Zacharia said she had passed it when she moved to China. She later told the New York Times she hadn't heard the question over the noise of Marine One during her flight.

In a tense interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday night, she acknowledged that she failed the California bar exam in 2011 and never retook it while considering the results inconsequential to her legal standing. As the segment ended, she promised Hannity she would be very prepared going forward and would step up to the duty the president had given her.

Zacharia and her family are scheduled to have dinner with Vice President JD Vance and his family on Friday night, a source familiar told the Daily Mail. This sudden change leaves many wondering about the limited access they now have to information coming from the West Wing. The speed of this departure suggests internal shifts that were not fully public until very recently.