Trump’s Dana White Press Secretary Joke Hid 71 Empty Days at the Podium

Dana White stepped to the White House lectern on Monday, asked who had the first question, and said he had zero political aspirations. It was a joke, and the vacancy behind it began on August 27, when Karoline Leavitt left the job.

The Dana White press secretary offer arrived on Saturday as a Truth Social post, while White was in London for a Zuffa Boxing card. “I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States,” Trump wrote. He asked White to bring six fighters as assistants — Islam Makhachev, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Justin Gaethje, Daniel Cormier, Amanda Nunes and Kayla Harrison — “even though some are not from our Country”, adding: “We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left. Dana will be a Press Secretary like none other. Dana, please take the job!” White House communications director Steven Cheung reposted it within the hour: “Hell yeah! Do it, @DanaWhite!”

By Sunday, the president was telling reporters he had been kidding. “I will tell you, I was only kidding,” he said. “It was just a little fun.” He pointed to the fighters as the tell: “And you can see that because I put all of the great fighters as his assistants.” He added that White “loves the idea” and that “there’s only one Dana”. The same day he shared an AI-generated cartoon, drawn in the style of a family sitcom, in which White stands at the podium and says: “Trump made me press secretary. I brought help.” A cartoon Trump pokes his head through the door and asks how the briefing went. “Fiery… but mostly peaceful,” White answers. The cartoon, about a minute long, was posted by the president on his account on Sunday.

On Monday, White came to the White House anyway, and Trump brought him into the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. White took the lectern and opened with the line he uses to start UFC press conferences: “I’ve always wanted to do this. Who has the first question?” Then he said it plainly, twice over: “I have zero political aspirations.” Pressed by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on whether he had accepted, he answered: “I don’t tell the president no to anything. I didn’t say no.” Trump put the question to him directly near the end: “Dana, would you like to be press secretary of the United States of America? Or do you just want to stay with this ridiculous UFC?” White thanked him and gave the final answer: “Thank you for the offer, sir. I do not want to be in politics, no.” Trump replied: “I am devastated to hear this.” White had a practical reason for the trip. He wanted Trump’s signature on a one-of-one trading card from UFC Freedom 250, the June event staged on the White House South Lawn. He had already posted an AI-generated image of himself behind the podium on Instagram, captioned: “On to the next chapter.”

Katie Zacharia lasted five days in the job White turned down. Trump named her on October 9, after Karoline Leavitt left the administration in August. She started on Monday, October 12, and held her only briefing the next morning at 9:30, a session of about 14 minutes in which she read prepared remarks for eight of them and took questions from three reporters — Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail. She used the briefing to announce that Washington had asked Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece, to resign. She travelled with Trump to campaign rallies in Alaska, Arizona and Montana over the next two days. On Friday, October 16, she was out. Trump had told reporters she might want to reconsider: “Katie, do you need this? I don’t think you need this.” He said she had been “brutalized by the media” and advised her: “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider.” The credential question had followed her all week. She had described herself as a lawyer, graduated from Pepperdine’s law school in 2011, and had not passed the California bar exam. Reuters could find no record of her registered as an attorney in any state or the District of Columbia. Asked on the South Lawn where she had passed the bar, she answered: “When I moved to China.” She later told an interviewer she had been given the briefing materials on Monday, they were not finalised until 8 a.m. on Tuesday, she had woken at 3 a.m. to prepare, and she had never had a full briefing beforehand. She had also, by accident, called her husband “the president”. Her five days made her the shortest-serving White House press secretary in history.

For 71 of the last 75 days, the White House has had no permanent press secretary. Leavitt left on August 27. Zacharia filled five of the days after that. The post has stood vacant since October 16 — 25 days with no successor named. The search has been running since August, and the only public evidence of it is the weekend’s joke.

Reporters have had two formal briefings in 110 days. Leavitt’s last briefing was July 23. Vice President JD Vance took the podium on September 3, the first briefing in 42 days, and told reporters he had agreed to stand in on the condition that Leavitt cover for him when his wife had their baby. Zacharia’s 14 minutes on October 13 came 40 days after that, and nothing has followed in the 28 days since.

The last time the room went this quiet, the secretary held the job nine months and never briefed once. Stephanie Grisham served from July 2019 to April 2020 and did not hold a single formal press briefing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. By February 2020, the White House had gone more than 300 days without one, a drought that began under her predecessor Sarah Sanders. Grisham later wrote that the president had told her not to resume them. The room stayed dark until the president himself began briefing reporters as the pandemic grew.

The job pays $195,200 a year. That is the top rate for full-time White House staff, the same money as the chief of staff and the communications director, set out in the White House’s annual report to Congress in July, with no raise in 2026. It is one of the best-paid spokesperson’s jobs in American government, and it has had a holder for five of the last 75 days.

Karoline Leavitt, who held the job for 584 days and left it to spend more time with her two young children, told Fox News she had offered to help choose the next one. “I’ve offered my help to the president to help him select someone who can serve him and the country well,” she said, adding: “There’s a lot of qualified people who can have it. It’s just up to the president to make that decision.” The names in circulation, according to reports, include CNN commentator Scott Jennings, former Fox News anchor Monica Crowley, former Trump lawyer Alina Habba and former Trump official Caroline Sunshine, but no one has been confirmed as under consideration for it. Trump, asked who might replace Zacharia, said a lot of people wanted the job. Leavitt starts at Fox News as a contributor on November 1, and she called the job “one of the hardest jobs in politics”.

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, used to be the UFC’s spokesman, from 2013 to 2016, and he earns the same $195,200 as the press secretary. White has spoken at the last three Republican National Conventions, in 2016, 2020 and 2024, and helped the party reach the young male voters who carried Trump back to the White House. The UFC staged its Freedom 250 event on the South Lawn on June 14. White, 57, runs the UFC, Zuffa Boxing and Power Slap, and his weekend is already booked: he heads to Madison Square Garden on Saturday for UFC 334, where Ciryl Gane defends the heavyweight title against Josh Hokit and Kayla Harrison defends the bantamweight title against Amanda Nunes. The UFC staged its Freedom 250 event on the South Lawn on June 14.

“Please, please, please god… make this happen. I’ll be good. I promise.” A Reddit user wrote that within minutes of the news breaking on Saturday night. Another, minutes later, hoped the opposite: “I hope this is fake. If not Trump is doubling down on the Nonsense.” On Facebook, under a post sharing the news, the suggestions kept coming: “I bet he will choose Mike Tyson as the secretary of education next.” “Can I recommend the Duo team of Rocky and Bullwinkle, jusayin y’all.” “Russel Brand may be availaible before sentencing.” The officials call it a joke, and the threads call it a joke. The threads use the joke to say the appointment has become casting. The record behind the joke is 71 days without a spokesperson. The liveliest theory of the weekend was that Trump had the wrong Dana White. “Apparently there’s a lady named Dana White who is an DoD public affairs assistant and I guarantee you someone recommended her to Trump and he thought they meant UFC Dana White and nobody is allowed to correct him lol,” one X user wrote, in a post seen by millions. The lady in question, Dana W. White, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson under Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, answered the congratulations herself on LinkedIn: “To everyone texting me congratulations: thank you, but you have the wrong Dana White.” She added: “I’ve stood at a podium and taken questions from the Pentagon press corps. I have never stood in an octagon. I’d like to keep it that way.” A political scientist at the University of Toronto, Connor Ewing, put the same suspicion as a question: “So what are the chances someone suggested this Dana White and Trump pulled a Four Seasons Total Landscaping?” There is no evidence Trump confused the two. She closed her post with a wish for whoever takes the job next: “Best of luck to the next White House Press Secretary!”

Democrats won both chambers of Congress on November 3 and pledged to investigate the administration. The White House will face that Congress with no chief spokesperson, a communications director who came from the UFC, and a chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who took over on Monday after Trump ousted Susie Wiles on Friday. The press secretary’s job is the one post in the building whose entire function is to stand in front of cameras and speak for the president. It has been empty since August 27, when Karoline Leavitt left the job.

Katie Zacharia, according to the New York Post, is trying to win the job back. Three sources close to Trump told the paper she anchored election-night coverage for the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network last Tuesday hoping he would see her performance and decide she was right for the job. The sources also said she was spotted at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend “staring at [Trump] trying to get his attention”. She denies it. “I maintain a loyal and great relationship with the President, but this story is utterly fake,” she told TMZ. “I’m not auditioning for the role.”