‘I’m Not Sure What You’re Saying’: Interviewer Baffled by Karine Jean-Pierre’s Defense of Biden

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Ex-White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre offered a muddled defense of former President Joe Biden in a response that left her interviewer perplexed.

On Monday, The New Yorker published an interview with Jean-Pierre conducted by Isaac Chotiner, who is noted for his persistent lines of questioning. This interview was no exception.

The two spoke about Jean-Pierre’s new book and her decision to leave the Democratic Party, which she announced in June. In the book, the former press secretary argues that Biden was betrayed by party leaders, who successfully lobbied to get him to drop his reelection bid in July 2024. That came just weeks after Biden turned in a disastrous debate against then-former President Donald Trump. Ultimately, the Democratic Party nominated then-Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump.

“You feel like you had to leave the Democratic Party because of the way it treated Joe Biden,” Chotiner said to Jean-Pierre. “How did it treat Joe Biden?”

“I call it a betrayal,” she responded. “And I was watching what Democratic leadership was doing. It was an all-out, full-on campaign to embarrass him, to push him out. And I just thought to myself, Wow, you don’t have that much time left this election year. And I thought to myself, This man is one of the most decent people that I know. And objectively, objectively, it was a good Presidency.

Chotiner then noted that Jean-Pierre deemed Trump a threat to democracy, which led to this exchange in which the former press secretary gave a jumbled assessment about the 2024 race. At one point, Chotiner flatly stated, “I’m not sure what you’re saying”:

CHOTINER: You lay out very clearly why you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. And, at the same time, you are suggesting that what happened in those three weeks was so serious that you had to leave the Democratic Party, even at this moment of grave threat. You said that the Party was trying to undermine Biden. What do you think they were doing and why?

JEAN-PIERRE: Well, I mean, I just laid it out. I just said that there was an obvious campaign. You just had to watch.

CHOTINER: Sure, but why were they doing that?

JEAN-PIERRE: Because they believed that he needed to step aside. There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.

CHOTINER: Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense. I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump—which was what the polls all showed—and therefore thinking that he should be replaced.

JEAN-PIERRE: O.K., wait a minute. Hold on a second. Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows what would’ve happened. People also thought that if you replace Joe Biden we were going to win, or have a better chance of winning. Millions of people who showed up in 2020 didn’t show up in 2024. We can’t forget that there was an incumbency issue as well. This is real. There are, like, several G-10 countries with incumbents who did not get reëlected. There was an incumbency issue as well.

CHOTINER: I’m not sure what you’re saying.

JEAN-PIERRE: No, no, no. Wait a minute. You are saying that this was their thinking, and they were kind of predicting. But nobody knew what was going to happen. Nobody knew that Joe Biden was going to win in 2020. Nobody knew what was going to happen in 2024. People believed in their hearts that Kamala was going to win. They believed it. They saw the polling and they thought she was going to win, looking at the polling. Nobody knew anything. I’m only bringing up the polls because you brought up the polls to me.

Read the rest of the interview in The New Yorker.