Sean Spicer, immortalized as the cantankerous Spicy by Melissa McCarthy on Saturday Night Live, won’t be returning to the White House press briefing room in the second coming of Donald Trump.
But he has thoughts on who will and won’t be the first press secretary in the incoming 47th president’s second administration. Spoiler alert: It won’t be a man, he says.
“If I had to put money on the next press secretary, I bet on it being a woman,” Spicer told the Daily Beast Friday.
On Thursday, on his show The Morning Meeting, he said the “diversity thing wasn’t an issue in 2016” for Trump, nor will it be this time around. “But if you’re not a woman, you’re not going to be press secretary,” Spicer said.
Which brings a bevy of Fox News faces to the talent pool.
One viable candidate is Laura Ingraham, the veteran Fox News host who has spent considerable time rehearsing the script. She was passed over for the job in 2016. But during the past four years that Trump and his MAGA movement spent in the wilderness, Ingraham became a leading voice on the right attacking Joe Biden—and his family—and fighting for Trump and his family to return to power.
On Wednesday morning, just hours after Trump’s stunning victory over Kamala Harris, Ingraham, 61, said, “It wasn’t just a personal triumph for President Trump and his family, who have all gone through hell, by the way—it was a complete and a total political vindication of his first-term record and of his current agenda.”
“These past nine years have been a total blur, because from the day that Donald Trump came down that golden escalator back in 2015 right up until yesterday afternoon, the elites counted him out,” she said.
Another name that rises to the top of the heap is Trump World darling Heather Nauert, who served as the State Department spokesperson in the first Trump administration. When Donald Trump spotted Nauert on Fox News, he immediately wanted her in his orbit, a source told the Daily Beast.
“He wanted her that bad,” the source said. Trump later named Nauert as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Nauert, 54, would bring a strong familiarity with foreign policy issues at a time when China, Iran and Russia pose particular threats to U.S. national security, with war raging in the Middle East.
Trump loves Fox and Friends, and the show’s blonde co-host, Ainsley Earhardt, 48, which makes her an instant candidate. Twice divorced, she also happens to be Sean Hannity’s girlfriend; Hannity’s show is where Trump regularly turns for a warm-bath interview, even more so than the Fox & Friends sofa.
The morning after Americans chose Trump to be their next president, she blamed the mainstream media for getting it all wrong and declared on the show, “This is the end of the legacy media.”
“Middle America loves God, they love country, they don’t want a handout,” she said. “They want to work hard and have their dollar go as far as it did four years ago.”
Trump has already chosen a woman for the top job in the White House when he assumes power on Jan. 20. His first staffing announcement was that his campaign chair, Susie Wiles, will become the first woman ever to serve as White House chief of staff.
Having portrayed himself as the protector of women “whether they like it or not” on the campaign trail, Trump will have plenty of them to protect—and boss around—in the White House.
A long-shot candidate, who also happens to be another blonde, for the job of White House press secretary is Kellyanne Conway—the woman who got Trump elected the first time. Conway was Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and served as an adviser in the White House during his first term. (Her ex-husband, the Never Trumper Republican, George Conway, will most certainly not be working in the Trump White House.)
A dark horse candidate who is qualified for the job of White House press secretary is Christina Pushaw, the spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron Desantis who also worked on his presidential campaign. Pushaw is a prolific social media attack dog on behalf of conservative causes, whose tweets of late have been conspicuously pro-Trump.
Don’t assume a DeSantis ally makes a Trump foe: Trump hired Wiles, after all, and she worked for DeSantis—for which she has publicly apologized and said she regrets working for the former Trump rival.
But there are two strong male contenders: Scott Jennings, an aide to former President George W. Bush, and Marc Lotter, who served as press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence.
Jennings, 47, is a longtime token Republican analyst on CNN, where he translates MAGA to the network’s liberal-leaning audience.
Lotter, 54, the chief communications officer at the America First Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank affiliated with Trump, has been auditioning for his long-shot bid on Fox, Newsmax and CNN but faces an uphill struggle on more than gender grounds: Trump ended up publicly repudiating Project 2025 during his campaign as it became an attack vehicle for Democrats, and MAGA World has feuded with some of those involved in drawing it up.
Sadly, for those who found comic relief in Spicer’s gum-chewing daily freak-outs on the press corps, there’s been some banter in the ultra conservative wing of the transition team about doing away with the televised briefing altogether.
For one key reason: “To deprive the press of grandstanding,” crisis communications specialist Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies tells the Daily Beast.
“But a lot of top comms pros think that would waste a huge opportunity,” he said. “Public antipathy for the press is at an all-time high and what’s needed is an appealing speaker with the rhetorical debate chops to leverage that advantage and rebuke the worst actors in the White House press corps on a regular basis.”
Think about it as a daily WWE smackdown, McCarthy said, “but with Kelly O’Donnell as the heel.”
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