KJP's Latest Ruse

By Rich Lowry on Jun 5, 2025

Now it's all coming out.

Not only was President Joe Biden in serious decline, Karine Jean-Pierre -- celebrated in numerous fawning media profiles -- was a rotten White House press secretary.

In an interview with Axios, a former White House official called her "one of the most ineffectual and unprepared people I've ever worked with."

The proximate cause of all the dumping on KJP is the same as the sudden truth-telling about Joe Biden -- she's no longer important, so there's no reason to tip-toe around her deficiencies, especially now that she's writing a book turning her back on the Democratic Party.

Jean-Pierre just announced that her new book is going to be called "Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines."

This is about as credible as, let's say, "Lawful: The True Story of Racketeering, a Choir Boy's Lament," by Charles "Lucky" Luciano.

KJP was in a job that required her to be a hack, but she outdid herself. She fronted for a contemptible effort to obscure Biden's condition from the public, toward the goal of electing him president again when he was barely capable of serving his current term.

This wasn't simply mindless or crude partisanship; it was a conspiracy against the public interest.

No one forced Karine Jean-Pierre to participate, even at the outskirts of this plot. She could have walked away at any time, probably with some other plum job within the Democratic-media complex.

She never exhibited the slightest doubt about the laughably implausible assurances she gave the public that Biden was in tip-top shape, and that the latest video showing otherwise was a "cheap fake."

She portrayed him as sharp and effective after his disastrous debate, and after he dropped out of the presidential race.

President Biden could have taken up residence in a nearby senior living facility, and Jean-Pierre would have said he was winning every bingo game and trivia contest -- and directing the Fifth Fleet at the same time.

Her job was to deceive, and she did it with evident relish.

Now, a mere five months or so later, she says she's decided "to follow my own compass."

It's funny how this works. For years, when it made her famous to follow the compass of the Biden conspiracy from the White House podium, she did it every day, no matter how ridiculous she had to make herself. Now that Biden is old news and there's no high-profile job available running interference for a compromised Democratic elected official, Jean-Pierre has become a fierce independent thinker willing to go her own way. She'd have us believe that she's become the Christopher Hitchens of former White House press secretaries.

The transformation coincides with what must be her felt need to say something that will make a post-White House book potentially salable, and given how poorly it all ended, there's not much of a market for "Triumph: My Time at the Side of the FDR of Our Time."

"Everyone thinks this is a grift," a former Biden administration official told Politico.

Others are denigrating KJP's abilities as a press flack, something they were often scared to do when she was still at the podium, in part because she checked so many identity-politics boxes.

She herself happily played this game. "I'm representing the Black community, the Caribbean community, the LGBTQ community," she told the publication The Grio at the time.

This was an unfair imputation about all these "communities," though. There was no indication, for instance, that Caribbean-Americans were particularly vested in having the daughter of Haitian-immigrant parents denigrating reporters for asking completely legitimate questions about Joe Biden's health.

It'd be one thing if Karine Jean-Pierre wanted to write a memoir expressing genuine regret over her part in the sordid end game of Joe Biden's career. This book instead looks like a transparent attempt to shift from one ridiculous ruse to another, and to hope, once again, that no one notices the obvious.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)