Where’s KJP?

By Rich Lowry

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

 

As the recriminations fly over the long-running White House operation to cover up Joe Biden’s decline, let’s spare a thought for former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

 

She was the front person for this conspiracy against the public interest.

 

It’s true that she wasn’t the instigator of the deception or a major power player, but someone had to go out and deflect and deceive every day, and that job fell to KJP.

 

In the press coverage of Jean-Pierre, it was often noted that she was the first openly LGBT press secretary, but her truly historic contribution was playing a high-profile role in one of the worst political frauds of our era.

 

She got into politics to make a difference, and the difference she made was to do her level best to mislead people about a matter of great public import.

 

If the media were much too willing to look the other way regarding Biden’s condition and parrot Democratic talking points, it’s not as though they didn’t ask questions about his health. Jean-Pierre dismissed them all as politically motivated and misinformed.

 

She laughed them off and slapped them down. There was nothing more ridiculous than questioning Joe Biden’s faculties or stamina. Why, as she told Don Lemon in a 2022 interview, “He’s the president of the United States. I can’t even keep up with him.” (She said this as a fitness buff who, at roughly half Biden’s age, was going for miles-long runs every morning.)

 

She added that it wasn’t “a question that we should be even asking.”

 

At the briefing podium and in general, she made sweeping, uncompromising defenses of Biden’s physical fitness and mental acuity from all comers.

 

Biden, she assured us, “passes a cognitive test every day.”

 

Videos showing him confused or acting oddly were “cheap fakes,” and confirmed as such by “misinformation experts.”

 

If Biden referred to talking to dead people, well, everyone, she assured us, occasionally misspeaks or misremembers. Speaker Johnson had just said Iran when he meant Israel!

 

She attacked Robert Hur for being “flatly wrong” to include material about Biden’s memory in his report, and, besides, he wasn’t “a medical doctor.”

 

She poured contempt on concerns about Biden’s age after his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, and after he dropped out. “There’s been no cover-up,” she assured everyone. “I want to be very clear about that.”

 

She was all in. All White House press secretaries have to, at times, defend the indefensible. They don’t, in the ordinary course of events, have to defend a man barely capable of serving as president whose reelection would have been bound to cause an enormous crisis.

 

Of course, KJP had to know Biden’s real state, and she could have pocketed the glowing profiles she’d gotten in the press and her status as a historic “first” at any point and made a graceful exit.

 

She could have become the president of Emily’s List, which, amazingly enough, might have been a more honorable job given the circumstances.

 

Instead, she chose to stay and lie. She wasn’t the most important part of the conspiracy. In Mafia terms, she wasn’t a mob boss or even a mob lawyer, but a mob spokesperson, who loyally and eagerly embraced her role.