President Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was forced out Friday, after less than a week on the job, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the decision, which was not yet announced. Ms. Zacharia did not respond to requests for comment. But Mr. Trump told reporters on Friday that he had encouraged Ms. Zacharia to “reconsider” the job.
“Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider,” he told reporters, recounting his conversation with his press secretary. He said he added: “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.”
He said Ms. Zacharia might continue to work for him “in some form, but maybe a more pleasant form.”
A few hours later, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, told The New York Times that Ms. Zacharia will be “transitioning into a new role that will be announced at a later date.”
Ms. Zacharia had gotten off to a bumpy start with her first and final press briefing on Tuesday, in which she largely read off a script and ended questioning after just three queries. That was followed by an onslaught of headlines about whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer — the president called her “an attorney” — despite failing her bar exam.
She had just started on Monday, and hadn’t even moved to Washington yet.
It was last Friday that the president offered her the job. A little-known Fox News commentator with whom many in the White House were unfamiliar, she was a surprise pick. While Ms. Zacharia did have the support of Natalie Harp, the powerful West Wing aide who rarely leaves the president’s side, others in the building believed her debut had been a disaster.
She was not a deft communicator.
She had represented herself as a lawyer in the news media, but when asked repeatedly by a reporter on the South Lawn of the White House to say in which state she had passed a bar exam, she twice replied, “When I moved to China.” She later told The New York Times that she had simply misheard the question — even though the president had repeated the reporter’s question to her while standing feet away.
The end was nigh after she appeared on Fox News on Thursday night to be interviewed by the president’s friend Sean Hannity, who asked her a few tough questions and treated her with rare skepticism.
The reception she got on Friday morning on “Fox and Friends” wasn’t exactly friendly, either.
“Do you wish you would have disclosed to the president about the bar and not passing the bar?” one of the hosts, Lawrence Jones, asked her.
“Well, Lawrence,” Ms. Zacharia responded, “those questions weren’t asked.”
The firing of the administration’s top spokeswoman capped off a week of remarkable upheaval inside Trumpworld.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece, was fired on television on Tuesday (during Ms. Zacharia’s only briefing). The president spent time in the Oval Office trying to get to the bottom of a vicious fight between two of his loyalists, Richard Grenell and Alina Mildon.
Paolo Zampolli, a longtime Trump confidant who claimed to have introduced the president to his wife, was pushed out at the State Department after one of his internecine feuds spilled into the press. And the daughter of Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and others in her circle, came under scrutiny for their moneymaking overseas.
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