Donald Trump is being urged to make a former campaign aide his next press secretary, but ex-colleagues say she had a rocky time the last time she worked for him.
Caroline Sunshine broke down in tears on the President’s 2024 campaign, vanished for hours and locked herself in her office, sometimes with her boyfriend, and was not invited to join the White House team after Trump won re-election, former colleagues have told the Daily Mail.
Now Sunshine, 31, has emerged as a dark horse to replace Katie Zacharia as White House press secretary, who managed just five days in the job after succeeding Karoline Leavitt.
Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director and powerful Trump aide, pushed her name to the President over dinner at Mar-a-Lago this past weekend, a source close to Trump told the Daily Mail.
The dinner came days after Sunshine demanded Susie Wiles’s resignation live on Fox News, barely 24 hours before the chief of staff dramatically quit.
Describing Sunshine’s previous tenure working for the President, one former colleague said: ‘Breakdowns in the bathroom, breakdowns in her office, kind of walking around the office with mascara running down her face, and something was obviously wrong, but no one really knew what or how or what was going on.’
The press secretary vacancy has sparked open lobbying at Mar-a-Lago, much of it through intermediaries, the source close to the president said.
Sunshine was not at the president’s club in Florida this weekend, but Pulte raised her name in front of Trump, Wiles’s replacement as chief of staff Stephen Miller and others.
Donald Trump is being urged to make former campaign aide Caroline Sunshine (pictured at the White House Correspondents’ dinner in 2018) his next press secretary
But ex-colleagues say she had a rocky time the last time she worked for the president. (Pictured: Trump with his former press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in July)
‘You know who’d be so good as press secretary? Caroline Sunshine,’ Pulte told the president, according to the source.
Trump replied: ‘You think so? She does a good job on TV, but she says bad things about me. She’s been doing better lately.’
Trump turned to Miller, who told him: ‘Yeah, she’s been doing good on TV recently.’
Miller replaced Wiles as chief of staff on Monday.
Sunshine is working the job from a distance through people with Trump’s ear, the source said. ‘She keeps trying to find people to bring her up. It’s a full-court press.’
But Sunshine has spent months criticizing Trump’s war in Iran, including in appearances on CNN.
That culminated last Wednesday on ‘Jesse Watters Primetime,’ when she called for Wiles to resign.
‘Susie Wiles needs to resign,’ she told Fox host Watters. ‘She needs to offer her resignation to the president before he has to ask for it.’
‘I think it was a dumb move on her part. I don’t understand what her end game is,’ a source said.
She had spared Trump on election night, telling Fox: ‘Tonight was not a failure for the president. Tonight was his base saying, “We still like you, we just don’t like the direction that you’re taking us in.”‘
The former Disney Channel actress, who in 2010 starred in the sitcom Shake It Up, worked as a press assistant in Trump’s first-term White House and as press secretary for Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential bid.
Bill Pulte (left) is said to have been lobbying Trump to give Sunshine the role
As such, she has emerged as a dark horse to replace Katie Zacharia (pictured) as White House press secretary
She joined Trump’s 2024 campaign as deputy communications director at its headquarters in downtown West Palm Beach, Florida.
But former colleagues said her crying in the office became a source of concern, with one saying they personally saw her in tears ‘at least two to three’ times, in the bathroom and in her office.
Staff who checked on her asked whether the trouble was personal or work-related, but she did not want to open up, the source said.
Her then-boyfriend Jack Advent, 23, the producer Trump nicknamed ‘TikTok Jack’ who ran the campaign’s TikTok videos, would sit in her office for hours when he was back in West Palm Beach, the source said.
Advent spent much of the campaign on the road filming the president, and colleagues rated his work. ‘He produced good metrics that people were happy with,’ one said.
Sources said Sunshine locked herself in her office for hours on multiple occasions, sometimes with Advent, when they believe she should have been working.
‘I’d love to know what she was up to. I can’t say I know because the door was locked,’ one said.
Sources who described the locked door said they did not see or hear anything improper between the pair.
The former Disney Channel actress, who starred in Shake It Up (pictured), worked as a press assistant in Trump’s first-term White House
Caroline Sunshine seen attending the 2012 Do Something Awards
Jack Advent (left), nicknamed TikTok Jack by Trump, was her boyfriend during the 2024 campaign
Caroline Sunshine at the White House in 2018 when she was working as a press assistant
One source recalled a workday when Sunshine never appeared at the office, only for colleagues to spot her on television.
‘I remember sitting in the office and having not seen her at all that day, in the heat of the campaign, wondering why she didn’t bother showing up for work,’ the source said.
The colleague who saw her in tears said she came and went on her own schedule, and could seem hardworking one day, ‘and then the next day you’d come to work and she’d be missing for three hours at a time.’
Sunshine was hired to handle press inquiries under Leavitt, then the campaign’s national press secretary, but two former colleagues said she was more focused on TV work.
‘She was interested in being on TV and getting public attention. She was not interested in what she was hired to do,’ one source said.
A second former colleague said: ‘I think she was… lazy. She didn’t have her priorities straight. She wasn’t doing what she was hired to do.’
Former colleagues said she was moved off press inquiries and spent the final weeks of the campaign walking reporters up and down the steps of the press plane.
Sunshine was not offered a job in the administration when the campaign ended, five former colleagues said.
Sunshine, Pulte and the White House declined to comment. Advent did not respond.
