Katie Zacharia out as White House press secretary
The new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is out of her role just five days into the job, according to a person familiar with the situation, after President Donald Trump said publicly that she should think about leaving.
Her departure marked a rare and speedy retreat from a presidential appointment that acknowledged a rough start to one of the highest-profile roles in the White House.
“Maybe it’s not for her,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on Friday, saying that he would ultimately leave the decision to her but falling far short of a ringing endorsement.
Trump complained about the news media’s treatment of Zacharia, who has been assailed for representing herself as an attorney even though she failed to pass the bar examination in California and is not licensed in any other state. Trump cited two appearances on Fox News — an outlet that the White House generally sees as favorable.
“She’s been treated, I would say, pretty nastily. And 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 said.
“I said to her, ‘Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he said.
Zacharia’s brief tenure was even shorter than that of former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, whose 10-day stint in the administration in 2017 became a byword for the staffing chaos of Trump’s first term. Scaramucci was fired after giving an expletive-filled interview to the New Yorker in which he discussed fellow White House staff in vulgar terms.
“Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain,” Scaramucci wrote Friday.