Biden Press Secretary Gets Skewered by Stephen Colbert for Defending Biden’s Fitness

Karine Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary, is participating in a media tour to promote her new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. Her numerous appearances with otherwise ideologically friendly interviewers—Stephen Colbert, Tim Miller, Gayle King—have not gone well, for a very specific reason: She has no satisfying answer to the question on everyone’s minds.

That question, which has rightly been put to her every single time she appears on television, is: How could you not have known the president was in such bad shape?

When King asked her version of the question, Jean-Pierre responded thusly.

“I was his White House press secretary, which means I had a role that saw him practically every day and traveled with him for more than 95 percent,” she said. “We’re not going to say that he didn’t age. He aged….When we talk about the mental acuity…I never saw anyone who wasn’t there. I saw someone who was always engaged.”

For Colbert, Jean-Pierre conceded that Biden’s June debate performance was disappointing but maintained that she had always seen the president in complete command of his faculties. For Miller, Jean-Pierre demurred and admitted she “could not speak” to whether Biden was well enough to serve as president until 2028.

Seriously, why is she putting herself through this?

The uncomfortable and unavoidable fact of the matter is that the news media—conservative and mainstream—had already taken notice of Biden’s diminished mental acuity well before the debate. A majority of the American people had noticed it. A majority of Democrats had noticed it. The difficulty of concealing Biden’s decline was such that the president’s innermost circle shielded him from press scrutiny, kept the Cabinet at bay, and scheduled can’t-miss meetings with legislators during the periods of time throughout the day at which he was sharpest. She was the press secretary, and she didn’t notice any of this? It’s frankly unbelievable, unless she was unusually out of the loop. (She certainly isn’t claiming she was out of the loop, however.)

One wonders, then, why she would bother telling her story in book format, and discussing it on national television, if she cannot honestly reckon with these incredible shortcomings.

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