Updated ,first published
Washington: Donald Trump’s new press secretary Katie Zacharia has been dumped from the role after just five days, with the president lamenting that the job was “maybe … not for her” following a poor debut performance.
Trump said he had encouraged Zacharia to reconsider her position and would speak to her when he returned from interstate. But a White House official confirmed to this masthead that Zacharia was “transitioning out” of the press secretary role.
It follows a poor debut performance on Tuesday (US time) at the White House where Zacharia – a conservative media commentator – read awkwardly from a prepared script, took few questions and fumbled her responses.
She was also caught up in a furore over whether she misrepresented her legal qualifications to the president, having now admitted that she never passed the bar exam despite marketing herself as a lawyer.
Trump told reporters on Friday that he urged Zacharia to rethink the job. “I just spoke to her about it. I said, ‘Katie, is this for you?’ Because she’s been treated very rough, and she’s a nice person,” he said.
“I said to her, ‘Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider’. You think about it. But I would reconsider. She’s got a beautiful husband and family. I said, ‘You should reconsider because you don’t want to go through this’.”
Trump said he would let Zacharia make the decision. However, his remarks left little possibility she could continue in the role. “Maybe it’s not for her,” he said of the high-pressure position.
Minutes after Trump made the remarks while departing the White House, several US news outlets including CNN and The New York Times reported that Zacharia had been fired, citing people familiar with the matter.
Zacharia did not accompany Trump as he left the White House for a rally in Georgia on Friday. Communications director Steven Cheung was present on the South Lawn instead as the president took questions from reporters.
The 41-year-old Zacharia’s first week in the highly scrutinised role included unusually combative interviews on Fox News on Thursday night and Friday morning, both of which Trump watched.
Anchors Sean Hannity and Lawrence Jones separately grilled Zacharia over her legal qualifications and why she had not told Trump she never passed the bar.
“Those questions weren’t asked,” she told Jones.
Zacharia also explained that she was only offered the job last Wednesday, flew to Washington and attended a meeting at the White House on Friday, flew home to California on Saturday and then back to Washington on Sunday before starting in the job on Monday and briefing the press on Tuesday morning.
“What I feel is I really stepped up to the plate to do the press conference with very little prep time,” she told Hannity.
The Fox interviews were widely seen as orchestrated tests for Zacharia and setups to justify her removal by the president.
Her five-day tenure sets a record for the shortest-lived White House press secretary in US history, beating the 11 days served by Anthony Scaramucci during the first Trump administration.
“Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain,” Scaramucci posted on Friday.
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