Remember Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden’s Pollyanna press secretary who would have us believe she kept losing foot races to the president while he formulated complex policy and solved multivariable calculus problems for fun? She hasn’t changed her tune. She still sounds like she’s standing at the podium, hand feeding a docile press corps.
But White House reporters aren’t so easy to manage now. For one thing, they’re a lot busier than when they were pretending to believe her assurances about her boss’s vitality. And they’re probably bitter. Biden dropped out of the race, dropped Kamala Harris in and ended up dropping the hated President Trump on them. They’re not ready to forgive KJP’s claims of being unable to keep up with an octogenarian of his “stamina,” and they don’t like the book she’s flogging, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.”
In it, she professes to have left her party and become the titular independent because they forced Biden out. Personal loyalty to her old boss is admirable. Ronald Reagan proved changing political affiliations can be a positive, but where are the American people in her equation? Should they have voted for a man who was clearly not up to the job?
Yes. She’s still peddling the idea that Democrats and their media pals should have judged the president on his “legislative wins,” and other achievements.
That apparently was too much even for Tim Miller of the anti-Trump magazine “The Bulwark” when KJP appeared with him on a podcast. He said Biden “talked way less to the press” than Trump does, and when he did, he wasn’t good at it. Her response:
The president spoke to the American people a couple times a week. He traveled and did domestic travel and talked directly to the American people. We are talking about a time politically that is incredibly partisan. It is hard. It was hard to break through any messaging. And it was an incumbency as well.
Usually, incumbency is a communication advantage – the “bully pulpit” and all that. What about the rest of her answer? That held up about as well as her insistence that she and her colleagues did “everything that we can to uphold…the Hatch Act and take the law very seriously” even as she violated it multiple times. How often did President Biden talk to the American people? A July 3, 2024 (post-debate disaster) piece in Axios compared the number of Biden’s press conferences, gaggles and interviews to his predecessors “as of June 30th of each president’s fourth year in office.”
It’s not even close. President Biden had 164 to Trump’s 468. Biden had 36 press conferences “either solo or with other government or foreign leaders.” That’s fewer than any president but Reagan, at 25. (The Gipper didn’t hold press conferences for a couple of months after being shot in 1981.) Biden gave just 125 media interviews. The next fewest was George W. Bush with 166. Axios breaks out another category where Biden did excel: “less formal Q&As with select, small ‘pools’ of reporters, engaging in this way more than any other recent president except Trump.” Impressive, but Biden’s 588 still pales to Trump’s 664.
Biden’s presidential travel talking “directly to the American people” was probably less prolific than KJP let on. Protect the Public’s Trust learned through a FOIA request that more than a year before Biden left the race, the White House was arranging his schedule around his physical condition. According to an email from a Maritime Administration official to staffers of the Office of the Secretary of Transportation, the White House canceled a planned visit to the Philadelphia shipyard after it “realized how many steps were involved to get on the ship.”
KJP couldn’t keep up with that? Imagine her trying to keep up with President Trump in his second term. The AP reported in May that in the first hundred days of this administration, Trump had more interactions with reporters than any of his six predecessors. The “129 interactions through news conferences or interviews averaged nearly two each workday,” AP said. Journalism nonprofit The Poynter Institute called that pace “unprecedented.” And there’s no reason to think he’s slowed down since May. Of course, amid the feast of access and content, the media still managed to whine about White House Press restrictions.
Truth is, KJP’s real challenge serving Trump would be keeping him away from microphones. And her real challenge with her book and appearances to hawk it – as with Kamala Harris’s book-storming tour – is that it’s all so 2024, and 2024 might as well be the Harding administration. The Biden’s somnolent Oval Office is buzzing again and much of the mischief KJP’s colleagues made while the president napped has been undone. Developments at home and abroad keep coming fast, and there’s little doubt the President of the United States is engaged and in charge.
If you doubt it, try imagining the headline, “Where’s Trump?”
Michael Chamberlain is Director of Protect the Public’s Trust.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre)
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