New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is leaving her job after just five days in the face of criticism over her performance, a White House official confirmed to CNBC on Friday.
Earlier Friday afternoon, President Donald Trump told reporters that he had just suggested to Zacharia that she quit.
“I just spoke to her about it. I said, ‘Katie, is this for you?'” Trump said outside the White House.
“‘If I were you, I’d reconsider,'” the president said he told Zacharia.
The White House official, who asked not to be named in order to discuss the staffing shake-up, confirmed Fox News’ report that Zacharia is “transitioning” out of the press secretary role.
Zacharia’s five-day tenure in the Trump administration is shorter than that of Anthony Scaramucci, who in 2017 served as White House communications director for less than 11 days. That length of time became jokingly referred to as a “Scaramucci” and was used to measure the durations of other officials who served briefly.
By that metric, Zacharia lasted one-half of one Scaramucci.
“Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain,” Scaramucci said in an X post later Friday.
Zacharia, a conservative commentator who worked at Trump Media & Technology Group, had faced widespread criticism in the days since she led a short and shaky first press briefing. She also came under mounting scrutiny about her legal background.
Trump spoke to reporters before heading to Georgia for a political rally as he hopes to boost Republicans’ electoral chances with just 18 days until the midterms.
But Trump’s efforts to sell his agenda have been muddled in part by Zacharia, who ended her first, and only, press briefing on Tuesday after delivering halting remarks and taking questions from just three reporters.
In the less than six minutes she spent answering questions, Zacharia revealed that U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle had been asked to step down. That departure, and Zacharia’s, follow those of a number of other high-ranking female officials in the Trump administration who have quit or been fired in recent months.
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“You know, she’s been treated very rough. And she’s a nice person,” Trump said of Zacharia outside the White House.
He accused the media of treating her “very badly” and said that even Fox News TV host Sean Hannity, a supporter of the administration, was “a little bit tough” on Zacharia during her appearance on his show Thursday night.
Hannity, after calling Zacharia’s debut briefing “widely panned,” had asked about her past claims about her legal work in light of reports that she never passed a bar exam. Zacharia has defended identifying herself as a lawyer, drawing a distinction between that label and calling herself an “attorney.”
Hannity pointed out that Zacharia had called herself an attorney in multiple social media posts. “I think they were retweets, and I corrected the record,” she replied.
Trump called Zacharia “an attorney” in his Oct. 9 Truth Social post announcing her selection to replace Karoline Leavitt, who left the Trump administration in late August. Zacharia’s first day was Columbus Day.
“She’s been treated, I would say, pretty nastily,” Trump said of Zacharia in Friday’s remarks. “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.'”
Asked if he would keep her in the role, Trump said, “I’m going to let her make that decision.”