The president did it gently.
In Washington, that’s sometimes the hardest way to hear it.
On the South Lawn Friday, President Trump told reporters he’d pulled his new press secretary aside just before walking out. His message to her: “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to… I think you should reconsider.”
Then, almost to himself: “Maybe it’s not for her.”
Katie Zacharia had held the job for one week.
Asked whether that meant she was fired, Trump waved it off. “No no. I want her to have a good life.” She’d “been brutalized by the media,” he said.
A senior White House official put it more plainly to Fox News: Zacharia is “transitioning out.”
It was a short run, and a rough one.
Trump named her on Oct. 9 to succeed Karoline Leavitt. Four days later she stepped to the podium in the Brady Briefing Room for her first briefing. It lasted 14 minutes. She took three questions. At one point she tangled her words, with her husband becoming “my president” before she caught herself.
The press corps keeps score in minutes, and it noticed. Leavitt’s first briefing ran nearly 47. Sean Spicer’s went about 79. Even Sarah Huckabee Sanders, no fan of long sessions, gave reporters roughly 23 in 2017.
Then came the bar exam.
When Trump announced her appointment, he described Zacharia as an attorney.
On “Hannity” Thursday night, she was asked whether she could actually call herself one. She couldn’t. She acknowledged she had not passed the bar and had never been licensed to practice law in the United States.
Her explanation was a little winding. “I had already pre-registered for the bar exam, and basically during the summer, I knew I would be living in China and the result of the bar would be inconsequential. I sat for it because I didn’t want to have a withdraw status,” she said.
On “Fox & Friends,” co-host Lawrence Jones pushed further, asking whether she regretted not telling the president.
She also defended the briefing. She’d been on the job “less than maybe eight hours” with a briefing book handed to her that morning, she told Hannity. “I feel like I did my very best, Sean, to deliver for the American people that day.”
Maybe so. But the knives were already out, and some of them were inside the building.
An unnamed White House official told MS NOW that Zacharia might not outlast Anthony Scaramucci, whose turn as communications director in July 2017 ended after 10 days. “She needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she’ll break Scaramucci’s record,” the official said.
The White House pushed back Wednesday. Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital that Zacharia was “uniquely qualified and whip smart” and would “do an incredible job.”
Two days later, the president was suggesting she think it over.
One small detail tells the story. The official @PressSec account on X, Leavitt’s old megaphone, was never handed to Zacharia. It hasn’t posted since Oct. 7. It was waiting for its next occupant. She never quite moved in.
She isn’t a novice. Zacharia was a senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, and before that a deputy assistant secretary for public affairs and spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security.
But the press secretary’s job is unlike almost any other in government.
Your first day is on live television, your stumbles become clips by lunch, and the resume has to hold up to the people grading you.
Trump didn’t make her endure a second week of it.
“I want her to have a good life,” he said. In this town, that counts as a soft landing.
