Commentator Katie Zacharia picked as new White House press secretary

Zacharia thanked him in a post on X, writing: “Serving President Trump and the American people at this critical 250-year mark is the honor of a lifetime.”

She said Trump had “shown America that we can be great again, and he works to effectuate that greatness every single day”.

She said she looked forward “to working with the White House press corps, and with reporters across the country, to get that record out”.

The 42-year-old political strategist is a frequent fixture on conservative Newsmax and Fox News, and has been active in Republican politics for most of her adult life, having worked as an intern for the Republican National Committee and for the White House Office of Political Affairs during the Bush administration in 2006.

Since June, she has been a senior communications adviser for Trump’s media company and Truth Social platform, according to her LinkedIn profile. She worked in Homeland Security from February to March this year.

While she was only briefly in government at DHS – which the mother of four later said she left because of the strain of travel between California and Washington on her family – she has long been a ferocious defender of President Trump and his administration’s policies.

In a June interview with the BBC, for example, she dismissed criticism of Trump’s controversial use of the White House to host a televised UFC fight, saying the principles of the UFC “are the kind of principles that founded our Constitutional Republic”.

“It’s about not giving up the fight until the bitter end,” she said. “I think there’s no better summation of the American ethos than a good UFC fight.”

Earlier this year, Zacharia wrote an op-ed in the New York Post about an incident in which she was asked to stop wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat to her local gym.

“I responded that I would never take my Trump hat off to appease the left,” she wrote. “This is raw, unfiltered intolerance. Freedom of speech doesn’t evaporate at the gym door.”

Justin Buchler, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, told the BBC that Trump’s appointments during his second term have been “based on personal affiliation and loyalty”.

“He values loyalty first and foremost,” Buchler told the BBC.

A lawyer educated at Pepperdine University in California, Zacharia also served as general counsel for Fix California, a conservative non-profit started by Trump ally – and current Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions – Ric Grenell.

In 2011, she spent nearly two years clerking at a law firm in Beijing, China.