Katie Zacharia took the White House podium this morning as the press secretary Trump introduced as "an attorney," a title no state bar can confirm. She read a statement praising him, took three reporters' questions, announced that the White House had asked Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump's ambassador to Greece, to resign, and left. She was out in about 14 minutes.
Roughly half of that was the statement, read from prepared text, on Trump's achievements and his rallies for the midterms. She gave the first question to Breitbart, in the seat the White House keeps for new media. Then she declared the briefing over and walked out through the shouted questions.
Karoline Leavitt left the job in August and the podium has sat empty since. Zacharia came to it from Trump's media company, where she had been a senior communications adviser since June, after a short stint at Homeland Security and years as a conservative commentator. She described the job as amplifying Trump's agenda, "to do what I was doing on the outside already."
Kaitlan Collins called the briefing "kind of bizarre" on CNN. One White House official told MS NOW she "got off on the wrong foot" and "needs to get much better, fast, otherwise she'll break Scaramucci's record." Anthony Scaramucci lasted less than two weeks as communications director in July 2017.
The three never reached the harder question, the one about the word Trump used to introduce her. An hour later, as Trump left for Alaska, reporters did.
