CBS’s Tony Dokoupil and Gayle King were left shocked by former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s continued defense of former President Joe Biden on Monday, whose insistence on Biden’s mental acuity caused them to ask, “Seriously!?” “and How!?”
Jean-Pierre joined CBS Mornings to promote her new book,
DOKOUPIL: So when this book landed on my desk, and I saw “a Broken White House” in the subtitle, I have to say, I thought you were going to say, that try as you might to convince Joe Biden to drop out of the race — cause what we were seeing is what you were seeing, and he was struggling and couldn’t do it — I thought you were going to say you were angry at that. But mostly, what you said in this book, is you were angry at the people who tried to push him out. Some Americans are going to say: “Seriously!?”JEAN-PIERRE: And, but not just the party that pushed him out, the party as it’s behaving today in this moment when when when he need a Democratic Party to be fighting, to be an opposition party, and that really what ignited the book. Right after the administration, I was just minding my
business, right? No longer public servant, going to the grocery store, going to my kids’ school. People would come up to me, and strangers, and they would say, “What’s going on with the Democratic Party? Why aren’t they fighting? We knew what was going to happen after this election. Why are they not prepared?” The stakes were really high. So it’s connected also to the moment that we are in. I’m telling a story obviously, my story, and how I started thinking about the Democratic Party and my involvement in it. And then fast forward to today, the disappointment, the disillusionment, that millions of people have-KING: But I want to pick up on what Tony was saying. Because I too thought that. And you said people said why didn’t members of his inner circle speak up about what many believe was the apparent decline of Joe Biden. And you said you are a member of the inner circle, and you never saw the decline. And after that, I wrote: “How!?” You even write, Karine, that you were on the plane with him going to the debate, and you didn’t see anything. It’s so hard to understand!JEAN-PIERRE: Well, when we were on Air Force One going to the debate, you gotta remember, his campaign people were on the team, his family was on the team. I actually was-, wasone of those rare trips where I didn’t really see him until after the debate even though I was on the plane. So really I take-, I want everyone to know that I take this question incredibly seriously. I do. 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%. We’ve always said, we’re not going to say, “Oh, he didn’t age.” He aged. He poked fun at it. We always owned up. And with age, comes what happens when you get older. But when we talk about the mental acuity, and again, I take this very, very seriously, I never saw anyone who wasn’t there. I saw someone who was always engaged. I saw someone who understood policy, pushed us on the policy, and also understood history. And there were times, I’ll tell you this story, there were times he would call me into the Oval Office, and I would be like, “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Because I knew whatever he was going to ask me was going to be direct, was going to be about a story he read, about how we’re pushing back, about how we’re pushing our message forward.
Watch above via CBS.