See FAQ: What's a reproducible example (`reprex`) and how do I do one? because it's helpful to know what object your column is in. Here's how you'd do it as a tibble.
library(dplyr)
library(stringr)
desc <- as.tibble(" x")
desc %>% transmute(value = str_remove_all(.," "))
# A tibble: 1 x 1
value
<chr>
1 x