I almost forgot that former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has her own Now The Truth About Biden Can Be Told™ memoir coming out about her time in President Joe Biden’s administration. In fact, I’ll probably forget it by the time it comes out Tuesday.
But on Monday, at least, Karine Jean-Pierre reminded me that she’s still Karine Jean-Pierre.
If you pay attention to these things, you probably heard the hook of the Notorious KJP’s new book “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines” a few months back, when she promoted it by announcing she was no longer a Democrat.
This wasn’t because she realized that the party was a dysfunctional mess of factional disputes, none of the factions worthy of consideration, but because they’d done poor ol’ Joe Biden wrong.
He wasn’t really the pellucid, senescent lump of flesh completely divorced from the affairs of the nation-state he allegedly ran that you saw on a debate stage June 27, 2024, KJP said. He was a man of and for the moment, even if he didn’t seem in the moment. And she’d tell you all about it on Oct. 21, for $29.49 for the hardcover on Amazon!
You’ll not be surprised to learn that, while the book isn’t technically available to the public until Tuesday, advance copies have gone out and the media is not, uh, terribly convinced by her line of reasoning.
I could give a rundown of the reaction, but I think it’s probably best to put it this way: She went on CBS on Monday to promote the book and got slammed by Gayle King — not precisely known as someone generally unkind to those peddling revisionist versions of recent history to make the Democrats look better — for claiming not to notice that the president she served was cognitively diminished.
In one particularly damning clip, King talks about the fact that KJP was even on the plane to that infamous debate. Just in case you have a short memory and don’t remember Joe Biden on that debate stage, or are Joe Biden and can’t remember being on that debate stage:
Is Karoline Leavitt a better Press Secretary than Karine Jean-Pierre was?
Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
“People said, why didn’t members of his inner circle speak up about what many believe was the apparent decline of — of Joe Biden and you said you’re a member of the inner circle and you never saw the decline,” King said in the interview.
“After [I read] that I wrote — how? You even write, Karine, you were on the plane with him going to the debate and you didn’t see anything. It is so hard to understand.”
In case you’ve forgotten about KJP’s powers of dissembling from her time in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., have a bit of a trip down memory lane in watching her try to explain to King why she didn’t notice any of this.
KJP: “When we were on Air Force One going to the debate — you’ve got to remember campaign people were on the team, his family was on the team. I actually was — one of those rare trips I didn’t see him until after the debate even though I was on the plane. So, really, I take — I want everybody to know that I take this question incredibly seriously, I do.”
So seriously that, when asked how she didn’t see the Biden that everyone saw on stage that night at the debate — and in the weeks that followed in other appearances, like the one where the then-president claimed he was the “first vice president, the first black woman to serve with a black president” — she wants you to know that she was in a different part of the plane that day, next question?
“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 percent …” she continued.
“And you saw nothing?” King asked.
“We’ve always said we are not going to say, oh, he didn’t age,” she responded. “He aged and he poked fun at it. We always owned up and with age comes what happens when you get older.”
“Which is?” asked co-host Tony Dokoupil.
“What I — what I — but when we talk about the mental acuity, and, again, I take this very, very seriously, I never saw anyone who wasn’t there,” Jean-Pierre continued. “I saw someone who was always engaged.
“I saw someone who understood policy, pushed us on the policy, and also understood history,” she added. “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 ask me was going to be direct was going to be about a story he read or about how we’re pushing back, how we’re pushing a message forward.”
⁉️Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre still says Biden was “engaged” while in office. @DailyCaller ⁉️ pic.twitter.com/fVlJCiOJ4m
— Harold Hutchison (@HaroldHutchison) October 20, 2025
What she said!
Following her former boss’ example, I’m surprised she didn’t claim she was the “first president, first octogenarian white man to serve with a black woman president.”
Given that she’s releasing what will hopefully be the final Now The Truth About Biden Can Be Told™ book that we hopefully ever have to care about, that would have been a fitting bookend to the beginning of the Biden acuity crisis — back when KJP was calling videos of the then-president looking obviously out of touch “cheap fakes” to a credulous media — to now, when everyone in Biden’s orbit is trying to launder their reputation and résumé through books that’ll hit the remainder bin faster than “The Rosie O’Donnell Diet” or “How to Remain Relevant As a Painter After Your Dad Leaves Office, by Hunter Biden.”
At least we established one thing, though: There’s no coherent way to explain how Joe Biden was coherent when he was running for another four years in the White House. Thanks for the reminder, KJP.
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