Karine Jean-Pierre Snipes at Peter Doocy’s ‘Ridiculous’ Question on Suggestion WH Staff Treat Biden ‘Like a Baby’
Tensions immediately flared between Karine Jean-Pierre and Peter Doocy at the latest White House press briefing when the Fox News reporter asked the press secretary a decidedly loaded question about how Joe Biden’s staff treat the president.
Jean-Pierre took a multitude of questions from Doocy on Tuesday and he began by invoking a passage from The Last Politician, an upcoming book from The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer. While exchanges between Doocy and Jean-Pierre usually cause sparks to fly, he decided to run with a very leading question, “President Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Why does White House staff treat him like a baby?”
The question was derived from a passage of Foer’s book, for according to an excerpt obtained by Axios, Biden fumed last year about the backtracking his aides had to do after he went off-script to say Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power” after launching Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“[Biden] knew that he had erred, but then resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess,” the book states. “Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler. Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?” Biden reportedly fumed.
Jean-Pierre instantly registered the negativity tinged in Doocy’s question as she responded, “No one treats the President of the United States, the commander in chief, like a baby.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she added. “It’s a ridiculous claim.”
As Doocy continued quoting from the book, Jean-Pierre retorted by dismissing the “variety of claims” made in books written about presidents:
I think I was asked this question last week by one of your colleagues about this particular excerpt that they were referring to and so I’ll say this: We did see the excerpt, the context of the excerpt, and it seemed to be making the opposite overall point about how the value of his experience and wisdom resulted in rallying the free world against authoritarianism, which is important — you all have seen this — and passage of the most historic agenda in most recent history, handling of the foreign policy like rallying the world around Ukraine as you have heard from our national security adviser who laid out in really good questions that your colleagues asked about how the president is moving forward…
As political observers posted highlights of the briefing to X, The Fourth Watch Podcast’s Steve Krakauer offered rare criticism of Doocy from the right, saying his questions were “intentionally antagonistic and are not designed to actually elicit substantive answers.”
Watch above via Fox News.
