Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary after five days, the shortest tenure of any Trump aide, and says it was an honor

The job lasted five days, and the ending was visible before it was announced.

Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary, USA Today reported, confirmed by five sources familiar with the decision, among them three senior White House officials who said she is transitioning out of the job. Word of the departure came shortly after President Trump told reporters on Friday, as he left the White House for a rally in Georgia, that the job might not be for her and that he had asked her to consider stepping down. He said she had been treated very rough and nastily by the media, that she is a nice person, and that he told her honestly, if he were her, he would reconsider, because she should be happy in life.

Zacharia posted her own account on social media on Friday evening. She called the president a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic and hardworking man, said she wished more Americans appreciated him, and said it was an honor to work for him. A senior official told the New York Post she will transition to a new role to be announced later.

The week in between was rough by any measure. Zacharia was picked by the president with an on the spot offer the previous Friday, without his chief of staff in the room, to succeed Karoline Leavitt, who stepped down in August to spend more time with her two young children. Her first briefing, on Tuesday, lasted about 14 minutes and took questions from three outlets. It was widely criticised. Questions then built about her legal background. She graduated from the law school at Pepperdine University but acknowledged that she failed the California bar exam and is not licensed to practise law, after having referred to herself as a lawyer. She defended herself on Fox News on Thursday evening, saying she had stepped up despite the fast start and the limited time and information she had.

Five days is a record, and not the kind a White House collects on purpose. It is less than half the eleven days Anthony Scaramucci lasted as communications director in the first Trump term before he was fired in 2017, a comparison Scaramucci himself noted on X, writing that records are made to be broken and that he takes no pleasure in other peoples pain. No successor has been named, and it is unclear whether cabinet officials will resume the periodic briefings they held during Leavitts maternity leave, as of October 17.