Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after just five days on the job, a senior administration official, an administration official and a source familiar with the decision said, following a widely panned first press briefing and the revelation that she represented herself as a lawyer but did not pass her bar exam.Earlier Friday, President Donald Trump said he would let Zacharia decide whether to remain as his press secretary after he suggested she was treated harshly by the media during her first week on the job.“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.Asked if he would keep her on the job, the president said, “I’m going to let her make that decision.”Zacharia held a brief press briefing on Tuesday, just one day after she started the job, and came under scrutiny after she had represented herself as a lawyer but acknowledged this week that she did not pass her bar exam following law school.
Zacharia’s first White House press briefing lasted less than 15 minutes, during which she took only a few questions from reporters and couldn’t answer one about whether the U.S.had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.
During the briefing, Zacharia announced that Trump had asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as U.S.ambassador to Greece, sharing that information after a journalist asked whether the president was planning to fire Guilfoyle over misconduct allegations, which she has denied.
Guilfoyle announced she was stepping down within hours.Zacharia had succeeded Karoline Leavitt, who left the White House position at the end of August after serving in the role since the beginning of Trump’s term in January 2025.Zacharia made a name for herself as a conservative commentator before her extraordinarily brief stint at the White House.
She served as a senior communications adviser for Trump Media & Technolo...