Trump admits mistake and fires Katie Zacharia after less than one week as press secretary — breaking record

Exactly one week after he announced he was hiring conservative TV commentator Katie Zacharia as his next White House press secretary, President Donald Trump has fired her after a dismal performance at her first briefing was followed by days of questions over whether she’d lied about being licensed to practice law.

A White House official confirmed that Zacharia had been canned just moments after Trump departed the White House for a rally in Georgia on the way to a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.

During a question-and-answer session with reporters, the president complained that his hand-picked choice for spokesperson had been treated “very, very badly, very unfairly” by news outlets — including a tough grilling by his own close friend, Fox News host Sean Hannity last night — and said he’d discussed whether Zacharia wanted to remain under such a tough media microscope.

“I said to Katie just two minutes ago, I said, Katie, you know, you don’t have to do this … the news has been so nasty to her. I’ve never seen anything like it. And I said, I said to her honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider. You think about it, but I wouldn’t reconsider. She’s got a beautiful husband and family … maybe it’s not for her,” Trump told reporters.

Zacharia’s short tenure — only five days from onboarding to firing — sets a new record for the shortest time served in the role by a White House press secretary or communications director, less than half the 11-day record set during Trump’s first term.

That previous record was held by hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, who Trump hired to be his communications director in July 2017 only to sack him 11 days later after just one press briefing and after he gave an expletive-filled interview to a New Yorker reporter in which he badmouthed other senior White House aides.

Scaramucci, whose last name has become a tongue-in-cheek shorthand for a unit of measurement of exactly 11 days, took to X to mark the fall of his ignominious record.

“Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain,” he said.

Asked what he wanted Zacharia to do going forward, he replied: “I just want her to be happy.”

And when pressed further on whether he wants her to remain in the job she started on Monday, he told reporters he would speak with her when he returns to Washington and stressed that he likes her “a lot.”

“I want her to have a good life. I don’t want to have a life like she’s led in the last three days. She is being brutalized by the media. I think very unfairly, but she’s been brutalized by the media,” he said. “When I get back, we’re going to talk because I don’t think that Katie could be made to suffer like she’s suffering.”

Trump reached out to Zacharia about taking the job without consulting his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the Washington Post reported, citing four people familiar with the decision. That led to rumblings that Wiles, his long-trusted top aide and the longest tenured in that post under Trump, was on her way out. And that in turn has set Trump off and also sparked a power struggle in the White House.

The president’s suggestion that Zacharia would not continue as his top spokesperson followed a disastrous week for the conservative activist, who first attracted Trump’s attention through ubiquitous appearances on Fox News, Newsmax and other right-wing networks — often timed to when she believed he would be watching.

She officially started work on Monday, three days after he announced her hiring in a Truth Social post. She unexpectedly held her first press briefing a day later and left reporters stunned after her initial appearance in the White House briefing room lasted just 14 minutes.

The neophyte spokesperson spent eight minutes of that reading — haltingly — from a scripted statement before she took softball questions from three conservative-leaning outlets and made a hasty exit after confusing the president with her husband and announcing the firing of Trump’s U.S. ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle.

At the time, White House officials said the president still had confidence in her, but the embarrassment of her awkward first briefing was quickly eclipsed by questions over whether she’d lied about her background and legal credentials.

A graduate of Pepperdine University’s law school, Zacharia routinely described herself as a “lawyer” or “attorney” in numerous television appearances leading up to her hiring at the White House.

But as she prepared for her first briefing on Tuesday, Popular Information author Judd Legum reported that she did not hold a law license in any state in the United States, which in some states made her description of herself as a “lawyer” or “attorney” a crime.

She first attempted to parry the questions by suggesting that she hadn’t needed a law license when she had her first job post-law school at a firm in China.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that she had failed the California bar exam and never retook it but nonetheless continued to hold herself out as a lawyer in as many as 18 television appearances since last March.

The deception even drew tough questions from Fox News host Sean Hannity, who grilled Zacharia on it during his eponymous program last night.

“You called it a ‘conspiracy theory’ as it related to the issue of being a lawyer,” Hannity said. “Now, you did go to Pepperdine. Pepperdine is a good school — no doubt about it. You took the bar exam, but you didn’t pass the bar exam. Correct?”

The Fox host then pressed Zacharia on whether she took the bar a second time but the press secretary began to ramble about getting married and moving to China.

“OK, but I wanna ask you specifically — I know that part of the story, and you did do all of that — but did you ever take the bar exam a second time or a third time?” Hannity asked.

“I did not, Sean,” Zacharia conceded.

Hannity then asked her, “Why not just say, ‘I went to Pepperdine Law School and then took a different career path’? Why get into this long drawn-out thing about the difference between a lawyer and an attorney?”

Zacharia said that she never provided legal advice and claimed she had consulted with legal professionals as to whether she could be labeled a lawyer when she appeared on TV.

The next morning on Fox & Friends, Zacharia appeared to throw President Donald Trump under the bus and raised questions about the vetting process when she said that no one in the Trump administration ever asked about her legal credentials.