KJP’s Failure Is Her Own

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 05, 2025

 

Joe Biden’s administration in exile has reached the “crabs in a bucket” stage. The moment one of its erstwhile members nears the point at which they might escape the gravity well of Biden’s disgrace, they’re pulled back down by their panicked and desperate colleagues.

 

Take Karine Jean-Pierre. Once the public face of the last administration, she had languished in self-imposed isolation since the election. She reemerged from obscurity this week with a forthcoming memoir in which she declares herself an “Independent,” liberated from the Democratic Party and Biden’s “broken White House.”

 

Her former compatriots in the administration are determined to prevent KJP from achieving escape velocity. Axios reporter Alex Thompson rounded up some of the juicier, albeit anonymous, backbiting Jean-Pierre’s book rollout inspired.

 

KJP “was one of the most ineffectual and unprepared people I’ve ever worked with,” one unnamed White House official said. “She had meltdowns after any interview that asked about a topic not sent over by producers.”

 

Jean-Pierre “didn’t know how to manage a team, didn’t know how to shape or deliver a message, and often created more problems than she solved,” another maintained. “The amount of time that was spent coddling [Jean-Pierre] and appeasing her was astronomical compared to our attention on actual matters of substance,” a third insisted.

 

Others dumped all over the “desperate” “hubris” in Jean-Pierre’s attempt to capitalize on her “extreme proximity to power” while still positioning herself as an outsider. “Today Karine lost the only constituency that ever supported her,” another source declared: “party line Democrats.”

 

Perhaps. As publishing strategies go, Jean-Pierre’s approach represents a trite but reliable formula for success. The center-left book-buying audience loves a conversion narrative — particularly one that leads the converted in a more leftward direction. Jean-Pierre’s attack on partisan politics fits a pattern to which Democrats typically retreat when they lose elections. They’re not the problem, you see; it’s everything else — the Supreme Court, the Senate filibuster, lobbying groups that support conservative programs at the state level, the two-party system — that’s broken. When KJP’s book tour kicks off, we’ll see what kind of reception she receives.

 

The American right might be tempted to look on this coming spectacle as the casual NASCAR fan might: just here for the crashes. Conservatives and Republicans do, however, have a rooting interest in this squabble. To the extent that Jean-Pierre’s rehabilitation tour compels her to implicitly repudiate the identitarian hagiography the progressive left fabricated for her, this might be a welcome development.

 

After all, it wasn’t just the White House that insisted KJP represented a historic watermark in American history. The legacy press pushed all their chips in on that narrative, too.

 

“Jean-Pierre reminds me that she’s not speaking for herself at the podium,” Vogue’s Mattie Kahn wrote of KJP in a glossy item that purported to dwell on all the “history she’s made in her career” but came up light on details. “She knows that what she represents is part of why Biden chose her for this role.”

 

Jean-Pierre was not above touting her own monumentality. “Representation matters,” she told the Washington Blade. “I am in this job because the president of the United States believed and wanted me to speak on behalf of him and said, ‘You have my voice, and you know how to speak for me, and this is the role that I want,’” she added, citing her status as a gay black woman and an advocate for the same. “I mean, that’s why he chose me.”

 

“I think this is important for them to see this,” she said of what she presumed would be the inspiration the people who share her accidents of birth should take from her appointment.

 

“I’m representing the Black community, the Caribbean community, the LGBTQ community,” KJP clarified in a softball interview with The Grio. “And it is incredibly important to me that I do that well.” When the outlet’s reporter, April Ryan, fawned over her subject and pressed KJP to explain just how it was that she could “still remain composed and fight in the midst of people trying to erase you,” Jean-Pierre leaned into her own mythology. “Because I have to,” she responded solemnly. “And I cannot fail. It’s not an option.”

 

Well, she failed — not only on her own terms but in the estimation of her boosters in media and her former White House colleagues alike. Are we to now presume that all the gay, black Americans for whom Jean-Pierre once presumed to speak are similarly discredited? If they’re not, does that not expose the extent to which the hackneyed popular-front solidarity the identitarian left cloaks itself with to shield its members from due criticism is nonsense?

 

KJP didn’t turn in an abysmal performance as press secretary because of the systemic obstacles before all who share her identity markers, and they are not on the hook for KJP’s shortcomings. Indeed, the reason why Democrats struggled to identify, much less call out, those shortcomings is due in no small measure to the fact that Jean-Pierre’s supposedly historic identity prevented them from speaking their minds.

 

As one unnamed official told the New York Times when her profile became eclipsed by her rival, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, it was hard to find Biden loyalists willing to risk their careers by being honest. “Can’t think of many topics I’d like to opine on less,” said one Democratic strategist of KJP’s inadequacies. That source, like so many others, “deemed the subject too politically and culturally sensitive to discuss with their name attached,” the Times observed.

 

That omerta served Jean-Pierre well — until it didn’t. Neither she nor the administration she served benefited from the eggshells on which KJP’s allies felt they had to walk. If anything, the contrived mythos erected around her prevented Democrats from executing a necessary course correction.

 

Of course, Democrats would be better served if they evaluated candidates for critical jobs on their individual performance rather than the tribes to which they belong, but so, too, would the country. Assessing individuals as individuals isn’t just the egalitarian ideal. It’s also best practice.

 

The Democratic Party’s baleful experience with KJP probably won’t produce any transformative realizations, but it should. If they were wise, Democrats would take the opportunity to call out the artificial cult of personality that briefly accreted around Jean-Pierre and deem it what it was: a display of narcissism on the subject’s part and motivated reasoning among her hagiographers.

 

If Democrats merely gave themselves permission to see what the rest of the country cannot ignore, it would go a long way toward restoring some sensibility to American political discourse.