Live By The Media, Die By The Media

Karine Jean-Pierre, the former White House press secretary and voodoo doll, is learning in real time what so many of us have known for years: The entire Biden administration, including Jean-Pierre herself, was a production of the dying news media, and was only made possible by the industry cashing in on its last remaining ounce of credibility.

Jean-Pierre is currently promoting her memoir, in which she declares herself “independent” of the Democrat Party and justifies the announcement by meekly attacking anyone who made her time in the White House difficult. As Politico’s widely read “Playbook” newsletter observed on Tuesday, “the book tour is not going terribly well.”

That’s true but it’s not entirely Jean-Pierre’s fault. The people giving her a hard time right now — that is to say, the media — are the same ones who did everything they could to keep her, her boss, and her party in power in 2024. That meant a lot of lying on their behalf. Jean-Pierre is only finding out that all that lying no longer serves a purpose.

Like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the rest of that embarrassing administration, Jean-Pierre was simply a tool of the media to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and his millions of supporters suppressed. The production was a success in 2020, but Biden’s presidency was an unmitigated wreck, nearly breaking the country in half. Anyone could see it, even as the media undertook the Herculean effort of telling voters for months that up was down, left was right, and Kamala could be president.

They said prices weren’t really increasing, that the border was actually under control, and the inner cities had truly never been safer. Biden was a mastermind executive. The adults were “back in charge.” And Jean-Pierre, most importantly, was the first black woman lady of color, and openly “queer.”

Everything was impressive and historical, they said. And then they lost the election with Democrats tossed by voters into an irrelevant void for at least two years. The production had run its course. It was over.

To be fair to Jean-Pierre, there was no formal announcement that the media were done lying to make her look good. It was an anticlimactic finale. That’s why she’s reasonably caught off guard by reviews of her book like the one in The Washington Post. That write-up by Becca Rothfeld called Jean-Pierre “an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word ’empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” I know the specificity stung.

She most notably subjected herself to a humiliating Q&A with the New Yorker, in which she fought like hell to shield her vacuity with tried and true appeals to identity. “I do not feel seen in the Party because I think they’re throwing the L.G.B.T.Q. community under the bus,” she said, presumably with a straight face. “They’re not fighting enough for migrants and immigrants.” (Jean-Pierre might have missed the very recent episode in which a Democrat leader in the Senate flew to Central America using taxpayer dollars for the purpose of re-importing a professed illegal alien from his home country.)

She also looked dumb in a video interview with the vehemently anti-Trump The Bulwark podcast, arguing (again, with a straight face) that Joe Biden as president was a wildly entertaining host. “The president spoke to the American people a couple times a week,” she said. “He traveled and did domestic travel and talked directly to the American people.” Her interviewer, Tim Miller, blankly stared at her through the camera, as anybody would.

Jean-Pierre, like everyone in the Biden administration, allowed the media to use her. They’re still being used, but she’s finding out that it comes with a price.