Katie Zacharia will be leaving her post as White House press secretary, just five days after her shaky public debut.

US President Donald Trump told reporters moments before news of her exit was announced that he had told her “you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to” and “honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider”.

Zacharia faced heavy criticism for her first press briefing on Tuesday, which lasted less than 15 minutes and included only three questions from reporters.

She spent the days following playing defence, fielding tough questions from news outlets about her credentials and preparedness for the job.

Trump hinted at her impending exit early on Friday afternoon, during an impromptu news conference in front of the Marine One helicopter.

“I said, ‘Is this for you, Katie? Because honestly, you don’t need this’,” Trump said.

“You don’t have to be treated this badly,” he continued, adding that he believed she had been treated “pretty nastily” by the media.

Hours later, praised Trump as “kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and the most hardworking man” on X, writing that it had been an honour to work for him.

As the November midterm elections, which will decide who controls the US Congress, draw closer, Democrats are seizing on Zacharia’s abrupt departure as a sign of failure in the Republican White House.

“The White House Press Secretary is gone. Maga extremists continue to fall apart,” the top Democrat in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, posted on X.

Zacharia appeared visibly nervous during her inaugural White House press briefing, in which she read talking points from a notebook, answered only a few questions and referred to her husband as the president.

During the briefing, a reporter asked Zacharia – who had been called an attorney by Trump and others and who graduated from Pepperdine University’s law school – about where she passed the bar exam. To practice law in the US, an attorney must be admitted to a state’s bar association by passing a rigorous exam.

“When I was in China,” she replied.

After intense scrutiny and digging by the media, Zacharia admitted on Thursday that she did not pass the bar exam.

She did say in a statement that she had practised international transaction law in China with the “appropriate credentials”.

Questions about her legal credentials became a major talking point throughout the week, with Sean Hannity, from conservative-leaning Fox News, lobbing particularly pointed questions at her during an interview on Thursday.

When she said she had not passed the bar, he replied: “Why didn’t you just say, ‘I never practiced law?'”

Zacharia also described how quickly she had taken on the press secretary role – having been hired less than a week before her debut – prompting him to ask: “Am I hearing that you think the staff should have better prepped you?”

When she appeared on Fox & Friends, which Trump often watches, on Friday, Zacharia faced a similar line of questioning.

She told the show’s hosts that she did not disclose to Trump that she was not an attorney, because “those questions weren’t asked”, saying she was hired for a communications role, not a legal one.

Host Lawrence Jones then asked her: “Do you think you still have the confidence of the president?”

She avoided offering a direct answer but ended by saying: “I hope to be able to build the confidence and trust of everyone around me.”

Zacharia’s early exit is the quickest among Trump’s White House press team.

In the president’s first term, Anthony Scaramucci left his post as White House communications director after only 10 days.

“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci wrote on X on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”