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Katie Zacharia Gets Sad Consolation Prize After Firing

Zacharia and her husband will head across town to a top administration official’s house.

Katie Zacharia, who lasted less than a week as White House press secretary, will end her final day in the role dining with JD Vance and his family.

Donald Trump on Friday fired Zacharia, who set a record for the shortest-tenured press secretary in either of the president’s terms. Trump publicly blamed the media for making her “suffer,” and said the 41-year-old mother of four would be better off not being subjected to their scrutiny.

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“She’s got a beautiful husband and family,” Trump, 80, told reporters outside the White House. “I met the family yesterday. Beautiful kids. It’s like from a picture postcard. And I said, ‘You should reconsider because you don’t want to go through this.’”

After her embarrassing exit, Zacharia and her family are scheduled for a dinner date with Vance, 42, Second Lady Usha, 40, and their children at the vice president’s official residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in northwest Washington.

Zacharia “still has lots of fans” in the administration besides the president, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle wrote on X, citing a source familiar who relayed the dinner plans.

A source familiar confirmed the gathering with the Daily Beast. The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Vances, married since 2014, also have four children: Ewan, 9, Vivek, 6, Mirabel, 4, and Alec, born in July. Trump, oddly, shared a photograph of the newborn before the Vances did.

The newest addition to the Vance family, the vice president explained in his memoir, was spurred by the killing of Charlie Kirk.

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Katie, whose maiden name is Black, married Tyler Zacharia in 2011. He too is an alumnus of Pepperdine, where Katie obtained her law degree—but did not pass the bar.

The Zacharias’ relationship came up this week amid scrutiny over Katie’s credentials, since she had repeatedly referred to herself as an attorney despite failing the bar in California. Katie said Thursday in a Real America’s Voice interview that she was “distracted and overwhelmed and excited” while taking the test because she had just gotten engaged to Tyler, who lived in Beijing, and she knew she would be moving out there too. She added that she knew she “wouldn’t need” to pass the bar in order to work on the international practice team at a Beijing firm.

Katie said she never attempted the bar again because she was starting a family. The couple had “four kids in six years,” she said. “2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020—boy, girl, boy, boy.”

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Tyler is a film producer whose Imdb credits include the 2019 drama The Professor and the Madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn, and the Martin Scorsese-directed The Irishman.

In her one and only press briefing on Tuesday, Katie mixed up Trump with her husband, whom she mistakenly called “my president.” Trump, she then said, is “the most family-friendly president we’ve ever had.”

“So my president—or excuse me, my husband, uh, that’s a, that’s a good one,” she said. “My husband is out here for the week because we have two birthdays in our family and we are very, very protective of celebrating birthdays as a family. So he brought the entire crew out here. Bless him. It’s a lot.”

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Katie noted that her family was planning to move to Washington, D.C., from California, as a result of her new role. It wasn’t immediately clear if that was still the case following her Friday exit.

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