President Donald Trump's new press secretary has run into trouble with colleagues inside the White House almost immediately after taking the job — and, according to administration sources, she needs to correct course quickly.

The account, circulated by the conservative website The Bulwark, draws on insider sources within Trump's circle who acknowledged that Katie Zacharia, Karoline Leavitt's replacement, stumbled during her opening session earlier this week.

The press secretary's job — briefing reporters from the podium and answering questions on the administration's behalf — puts a new spokesperson's early stumbles on public display, which is why first briefings tend to draw outsized scrutiny.

"The new White House press secretary had her first press conference today. It was amazing," The Bulwark's Jonathan V. Last said on Tuesday. "I'm just going to tease this for later in the show because we are going to do a live react to the full press conference, all 14 minutes of it. It's going to be the most tremendous content you've ever gotten from this show."

He added that "at 10.03, immediately following the press conference, we got an anonymous quote from a White House official to MS Now's Jake Traylor saying, getting behind the podium is tough, but she got off on the wrong foot. She needs to get much better fast. Otherwise, she'll break Scaramucci's record. That's 11 days. Wow." The reference is to Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted 11 days as White House communications director in 2017, a stretch that became shorthand for brevity in Trump-era staff tenures.

Zacharia's press conference was widely viewed as a failure for several reasons. As one veteran journalist explained on Tuesday, the core problem comes down to basic competence.

"The problem is it's not red meat, it's pink slime," John Avlon said of Zacharia. "I mean, there's no substance here. Even with the stuff that's designed to rally the base, because when it's simply red and prepackaged, it has no resonance, it has no credibility. And she said, oh, he's his own best spokesperson, which we expect, right? But that's because her job is not to make news, apparently, or to communicate to the journalists in the room. It is to basically defer to the president and parrot the party line."

Another veteran journalist, Vaughn Hillyard, pointed out that Zacharia struggled with a basic question about US foreign policy in Ukraine — specifically, whether the United States would continue to share foreign intelligence with the country.

"That's a very basic question," he said. "She didn't have an answer. That basic should be, 'yes.'"

Ukraine has been at war with Russia since Moscow's full-scale invasion in February 2022, and US intelligence-sharing has been one of the most sensitive threads in that relationship — context that helps explain why an unanswered question on the topic drew immediate attention.

One Trump official privately conceded to MS NOW on Tuesday that Zacharia had failed to make a positive impression.

"Her 14-minute performance was more than enough to alarm some inside and close to the White House," MS NOW. "During her opening remarks, Zacharia rarely looked up from the binder on the podium. She then took just three questions, all from conservative-leaning outlets. It was a sharp departure from her predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, who paired a combative style with an effort to engage reporters across the press corps."

Questions have also been raised about Zacharia's qualifications. Admission to the bar is required to practice law in any US jurisdiction, and bar admission rolls are public records.

Although Zacharia has repeatedly asserted on the record, "I'm a lawyer," Judd Legum's Popular Information Substack published an investigative report on Tuesday alleging that Zacharia has not been admitted to any bar in the continental United States, Alaska or Washington.

As of the accounts published Tuesday, neither Zacharia nor the White House was quoted responding to the bar-admission allegation, and two open questions now hang over her early tenure: whether her next briefings engage the full press corps, and how the White House addresses the report on her credentials.