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| Wiles and Zacharia |
Katie Zacharia lasted just five days as White House press secretary—the shortest tenure in the role’s history—after a disastrous first briefing and mounting scrutiny over her legal credentials, with sources telling the Daily Mail that chief of staff Susie Wiles orchestrated her removal.
Zacharia, 41, never returned to the podium after her 14-minute debut on Monday. On Friday she was summoned to meet President Trump, who handled the conversation gently. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he told her. “Honestly if I were you I’d reconsider.” Allies said she arrived ready for an ambush and quickly realized it was over. Communications director Steven Cheung then announced she would transition into a new role to be named later.
The exit came days after Cheung had publicly defended her, insisting “up and down the White House, everyone has been thoroughly impressed with Katie in just a few short days on the job,” dismissing contrary reports as “trash,” and tweeting that she would be “remembered as one of the all-time greats.”
Wiles, nicknamed Trump’s “ice maiden,” had been bypassed when the president personally selected Zacharia from relative obscurity last week. As headlines focused on whether she had misrepresented herself as a lawyer—Trump had called her “an attorney” despite her failing the bar exam—Wiles moved to end the experiment. Senior administration officials said she directed Fox News to confront Zacharia aggressively. In a Thursday night interview, Sean Hannity told her the briefing had been “widely panned” and pressed her on the bar failure; she replied that she had known she would be living in China and that the result “would be inconsequential.” A Friday morning Fox & Friends segment was equally pointed, with co-host Lawrence Jones asking whether she wished she had disclosed the failure to the president. Sources described the interviews as a “double punch” from Wiles and said the network’s tough questioning signaled that Zacharia could not handle even friendly outlets, let alone CNN.
Zacharia had lived in Beijing from 2011 to 2013 with her husband after law school. Her five-day stint undercuts the previous record of 11 days set by Anthony Scaramucci in Trump’s first term. A senior official summed up the episode: “Zacharia was an obviously bad choice. This was totally predictable.”