Trump’s Damning Secret Verdict on Katie Zacharia Leaks

Kevin Lamarque / REUTERS President Donald Trump’s damning opinion of Katie Zacharia’s short-lived job as press secretary has leaked—and it is not pretty.

Trump told advisers in a meeting that the 41-year-old press secretary, who was in the job for less than five days before being fired on Friday, has “no talent” and “shouldn’t be on television,” insiders told Politico , paraphrasing the president’s words.

The report says Zacharia was not present at the meeting where he trashed her performance.

To her face, Politico reports that Trump urged the mother of four to reconsider whether she wanted the position after all.

Trump, 80, told reporters on Friday that he asked Zacharia if she really wanted the high-pressure gig.

“I just spoke to her about it,” he told a gaggle of reporters outside the White House.

“I said, ‘Katie, is this for you?’ Because she’s been treated very rough.” The canning of Zacharia comes the same week she fled her first press briefing after three softball questions, was exposed for claiming she was a lawyer despite failing the bar exam, and struggled to answer questions coherently when grilled by the typically MAGA-friendly Fox News host Sean Hannity in a primetime appearance on his show.

Zacharia’s firing makes her the shortest-tenured senior White House official in modern presidential history, eclipsing the previous record-holder, Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted just 11 days as White House Communications Director in MAGA 1.0.

Her appearance on Hannity , one of the president’s favorite shows, was the final straw, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

There, Zacharia blamed her car-crash first press briefing—in which she took just three questions, all from right-wing outlets—on not having enough time to prepare, having just been hired, then struggled to defend her repeatedly portraying herself as a lawyer despite failing the bar exam.

To end the segment, she delivered a word salad as the show played her off with music after Hannity asked how she would improve in future briefings.

“So what I, what I would say, is I would absolutely be very well prepared on the briefing, Sean,” she said.

“And I would love, and I do love questions.

And I would love to build a relationship with all of those members of the press corps, so there is a substantive component to us having an ability to interact, and I will be very prepared, Sean, and I will step up to the duty that President Trump has asked me to as press secretary.” Collins reports that Trump was “embarrassed” by Zacharia’s briefing.