If I had to guess, I’d say White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre might secretly be glad that she will be out of a job in January. After Vice President Kamala Harris’ disastrous loss to President-Elect Donald Trump, it’s been quite difficult for her to answer questions during press conferences.
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In fact, she addressed reporters during a Thursday briefing in which she fielded questions about the aftermath of the election and previous comments made by President Joe Biden and others.
Jean-Pierre began the briefing by explaining that Biden spoke with Trump “to congratulate him on his victory” and assure him that “he would direct his entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition of power.”
Biden also spoke with Harris “to congratulate her on a historic, inspiring campaign,” a comment Jean-Pierre would regret minutes later when a reporter called her on it.
“You said the vice president ran a great campaign, and yet she underperformed in every state compared with President Biden when he ran in 2020. Why do you suppose that was?” the reporter asked.
The press secretary struggled to address the query, saying she is “not going to do punditry from here,” and that “there’s going to be plenty of time for election experts to look under the hood, to tinker around in it, to figure out what happened”:
But I would say she ran an impressive campaign. Some of you reported that. What she was able to do, it was impressive. The amount of money she was able to raise, how she was able to put together a campaign around her. A campaign that obviously the President built and was happy to hand that over to her, and she stepped up to the moment. Now, there’s going to be a lot that’s going to be discussed about what happened, the data, exactly what occurred. And so I’m going to leave that to them.
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Jean-Pierre then sought to convince the public that one of the reasons Harris lost was because of the COVID-19 pandemic. She intimated that similar results occurred in other countries.
Another reporter brought up comments Biden made about what would happen in America if Harris lost. “This administration message to millions of Americans that they’re going to wake up the day after the election if Trump won and have their rights stripped away, that democracy would crumble, and President said, today ‘We’re going to be okay.’ So how do you square that?”
Jean-Pierre responded:
The American people made the decision. There was an election two nights ago. There was. And it was a free and fair election, and we respect the election process. We do. Americans spoke. The job of the President is to make sure we respect that. The job of the President is to make sure that we have a peaceful transfer power. That is what the American people deserve. That’s what we’re going to… It’s not complicated. It’s truly, truly as simple as that. As simple as that. The President called the President-Elect, invited him to the White House. You know why? Because that’s customary. That is customary. That is what you do. If you respect what the American people decided, that’s what you do. And that’s what the President is going to make sure that the Trump transition It has what it needs, which is being led, obviously, by our chief of staff here. Why? Because the President wants to lead by example. It’s not complicated. It really isn’t. That’s important.
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If you’re thinking “Okay but she didn’t answer the question,” then that is probably because Jean-Pierre didn’t answer the question. But how could she? Her boss and others on the left waxed apoplectic about the outcome of this lesson, claiming that all hell would break loose if the Orange Man What Is Bad™ won the race.
Another journalist also brought up Biden’s contention that Trump is a “threat to democracy” and asked whether this was just “political rhetoric.”
Jean-Pierre did a bit better on this one, but it was clear she was doing her best to spin her boss’ silly comments into something resembling a coherent answer:
“If you know the President, you know that him saying, We’re all going to be okay. He’s an optimist. He believes when you get knocked down, you get back up. We lost, but we’re not defeated. We suffered a defeat, but we’re not defeated. And That is the President’s optimistic nature. And it’s very similar to the question that I just got from Karen. The President believes, as you asked me about the threat to democracy, believes in being an obligation to be honest to the American people…The former President, now the President-Elect, talked about an enemy within. He talked about mistreating Americans who disagree with him about terminating the Constitution.”
It wasn’t an easy press conference for Jean-Pierre given that Democrats have been fearmongering about another Trump presidency since he first announced his intention to run again. But the questioning from the reporters was spot on in that it forced the administration to essentially admit that all their caterwauling about “democracy” was just a way to scare up some votes for their candidate.
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