On the menu today: Brace yourselves. I’m about to defend former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre! Sort of. Kind of. Okay, it’s not so much a defense of her as a venting of the spleen at her newfound — very newfound — critics on the left and center.
The Truth Is That KJP Is No Longer Useful or Convenient for Democrats
What follows here might sound like a qualified defense of former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. But it’s not really a defense — it’s more of an observation that the sudden wave of blistering criticism and sneering mockery of Jean-Pierre from the left and center left is all a little too late and a little too convenient. As I am fond of saying, “There are few crimes in Washington more denounced than being right too early.” Up until fairly recently, it was considered rude, and perhaps even racist or sexist, to notice that the White House press secretary was a thoroughly ineffective communicator who kept babbling barely coherent answers and offering implausible spin.
But now that Jean-Pierre is on her book tour and defending her and Joe Biden’s record? This week, everybody’s lining up to take a hard whack at her like she’s a piñata.
Elisabeth Bumiller, writing in the New York Times: “White House press secretaries are supposed to know how to talk to the press. But that has not been evident this week for Karine Jean-Pierre.”
Perry Bacon insists in the New Republic, “There’s a Good Identity Politics—and Then There’s Karine Jean-Pierre.” (You know, some of us think there’s no such thing as good identity politics!)
Sarah Jones, writing in New York magazine: “[Jean-Pierre’s book] Independent is more of an audition to co-host The View than a serious analysis of the Democratic Party and its troubles, and it fails on both counts.”
And as noted earlier this week, Jonathan Chait, now with The Atlantic, contended, “This is an interview that should inspire some follow-up reporting: how was KJP hired for her job in the first place?”
Apparently, even some of Jean-Pierre’s former coworkers see her as a walking disaster area and are eager to leak their criticisms. Eli Stokols and Alex Gangitano of Politico report, “Some former West Wing staffers are privately texting one another wondering why she can’t answer questions about her own book with greater clarity or coherence. Others are bristling at her emphasis on identity politics. Most just hope that she will be ignored, another bad news cycle with a short shelf life that doesn’t do lasting damage to an already tarnished brand.”
Where was all this when she was in the job? Criticism of Jean-Pierre outside of the conservative press wasn’t unheard of, but it was rare. More often, we got gushing profiles about how historic she was — as she endlessly reminds us — by being a “black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community.” In October 2024, Vogue did a big glossy spread on how she was “always on the go.” It was her second glossy profile in the magazine in a bit more than a year!
I alluded to this earlier in the week on X, but it’s time to call it out directly: Everybody’s ripping into Jean-Pierre now, because it’s safe to do so. The Jean-Pierre of 2025 is not all that different from the Jean-Pierre of 2022, 2023, and 2024. If you’re reading this, you probably thought Jean-Pierre was an idiot long ago. But now that Jean-Pierre can no longer do favors for reporters who want to cover the president, she’s an easy, risk-free target for everyone in Washington. It’s amazing how her idiocy was coincidentally discovered about 15 minutes after every reporter in Washington no longer needed access or scoops from the Biden White House.
A quick review of some of Jean-Pierre’s greatest hits:
- In March 2023, she contended that fentanyl trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border was at historic lows, when the data indicated it was at or near an all-time high.
- In May 2023, our Brittney Bernstein laid out Jean-Pierre’s “year of no comments.”
- In July 2023, she declared everyone in the administration had full confidence that the U.S. Secret Service would determine who brought the cocaine into the White House. The U.S. Secret Service closed its investigation after conducting no interviews, with no arrests and no suspects. The Hunter — er, the hunt came up empty.
- Seven times between July 2023 and November 2024, Jean-Pierre emphatically insisted that Joe Biden would never give his son Hunter a presidential pardon.
- In January 2024, she admitted that sometimes she and other White House officials leaked the content of private conversations when it suited their interests, but otherwise opposed revealing that information.
- In May 2024, she responded to a question about “the risk to the U.S. milk and meat supply from the bird flu epidemic in cattle” with, “I don’t consume any meat.”
- In June 2024, she insisted that viral videos of Biden’s mishaps, including footage of him freezing up at a lavish Hollywood fundraise, were “cheap fakes” maliciously and falsely edited to make the president look bad.
- In January, before Biden left office, “Jean-Pierre dismissed State Department press spokesman Matthew Miller as ‘a random person.’”
Now, it’s worth noting that a couple times during Jean-Pierre’s tenure, mainstream media institutions did give her some bad reviews or wrote critical profiles. One month into the job, a trio of Politico reporters wrote, “Her answers have baffled reporters, and even made some of her White House colleagues wince.” And in January 2023, Oliver Darcy, then with CNN, wrote, “Frustration among White House reporters with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is reaching a boiling point. . . . ‘She is arguably the least effective White House press secretary of the television era,’ one veteran White House reporter told me on Wednesday. She has openly struggled to field basic questions inside the briefing room, relying, in agonizing fashion at times, on her binder of talking points to respond to simple inquiries.”
We know darn well what’s going on here. First, as Megyn Kelly emphasized yesterday, Karine Jean-Pierre is no longer useful to the Democratic Party, so no one is interested in protecting her.
But secondly, Jean-Pierre is embarrassing Democrats by continuing to say things that were supposed to be memory-holed. On her book tour, she’s reiterating what a whole lot of Democrats believed, said, and defended right up until the night of Joe Biden’s debate.
In the past few weeks, Jean-Pierre has insisted that even as an octogenarian, Joe Biden could have served another four years and ably performed his duties. (Again, the man who turns 83 years old next month is getting radiation therapy for prostate cancer.) She’s insisted the Biden administration had no scandals, and that Biden had done a great job.
Now, a whole lot of people in the Democratic Party and mainstream media were insisting the same things, right up until shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern on June 27, 2024.
Sure, Jean-Pierre is completely wrong when she insists that the Democratic Party’s leadership acted wrongly, unethically, or immorally when they pushed Biden out as their nominee in the summer of 2024. But you can’t begrudge her feeling some whiplash in a world where Delaware Senator Chris Coons was attacking other Democrats for expressing the same doubts about Biden’s abilities that he had himself.
To be a Democrat in 2024 meant believing, and publicly insisting, that Biden was fine for another four years, and then, just about immediately after the debate, completely reversing yourself and insisting that Biden had to be replaced with Kamala Harris. Jean-Pierre’s cardinal sin is that she still believes all the things she was supposed to believe on the afternoon of June 27 and publicly says so. She’s still insisting that the emperor is wearing clothing, and a whole lot of Democrats want everyone to forget that they, too, spent a lot of time insisting the emperor’s new clothes looked fabulous.
She’s a dunce, but she’s an honest dunce. (I guess this turned out to be a qualified defense of Jean-Pierre after all!)
ADDENDUM: Roger Dunaway, the assistant director of media relations at Tulane University, writes in with an updated statement that doesn’t seem all that different than what was written yesterday, but because I’m such a nice guy, here it is:
Nonhuman primates at the Tulane National Biomedical Research Center are provided to other research organizations to advance scientific discovery. This is a common practice among research organizations. On Oct. 28, a vehicle was transporting 21 Rhesus Macaques when an accident occurred on I-59 in Mississippi. The nonhuman primates were not being transported by Tulane, not owned by Tulane, and not in Tulane’s custody. The primates in question were not carrying any diseases and had received recent checkups confirming that they were pathogen-free. Although Tulane did not transport or own the nonhuman primates at the time of the incident, we sent a team of animal care experts to assist in this tragic incident. Questions regarding the missing nonhuman primates and other details of this case should be referred to the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office.
The Baton Rouge Advocate reports, “Officials with the wildlife department said Wednesday they are coordinating with local authorities to hunt down the remaining monkeys and urged residents to avoid contact and report sightings by calling 1-800-BE-SMART.”