Daily Beast report has traders treating Zacharia as Trump's press secretary

Traders now treat Anna Kelly’s selection as effectively ruled out after a further slide in expectations following The Daily Beast’s report that President Donald Trump picked Katie Zacharia. The report, published Friday and citing two sources also cited by The New York Times, has not been confirmed by the White House. The question remains officially unresolved: confirmation that Trump chose someone else would make Kelly’s selection impossible under the market’s terms, but the report alone is not an official announcement.

The latest decline deepened a sharp drop that readers were told about earlier Friday, when Kelly went from an outside possibility to a long shot. Before the report, expectations had held steady for several days. Earlier in October they dipped, then partly recovered, leaving Kelly an unlikely contender. No credible reporting identified a cause for those earlier swings; the Zacharia report is the first sourced development found that directly names a successor.

The succession opened after Trump announced in August that Karoline Leavitt would leave the press secretary role at the end of the month. CBS News reported before her departure that Trump had not settled on a replacement, while Scott Jennings had been floated but was considered unlikely to get the job. Leavitt’s final day was Aug. 27, and The Washington Post reported that a replacement might not be named immediately. An official White House or Trump confirmation is the next consequential development; no related scheduled decision has been identified. The reported choice of Zacharia, if confirmed, would close the question against Kelly, and later replacement announcements would not change the result.