What Everyone Is Talking About

Playbook: “The afterlife of the White House press secretary is normally a charmed one, with all those high-pressure televised briefings giving way to something more comfortable and — dare I say — even better-paid…”

“But it doesn’t always go that way. And things are certainly looking a little shaky this morning for Karine Jean-Pierre… As you cannot have failed to notice if you’ve opened any form of social (or even legacy) media this week, KJP currently has a book to sell. And — how to put this delicately? — the book tour is not going terribly well.”

“In retrospect, this no-regrets interview with the Never Trumpers at The Bulwark at the start of last week should have been a red flag. Conservative circles shared her defense of Biden’s media performances with glee. Then another ‘no regrets’ interview, with MSNBC, went equally viral on the left — and not in a good way. Jean-Pierre’s answers to the most critical questions the Democratic Party has faced in decades seemed… incoherent, at best. This book review, by Washington Post’s Becca Rothfeld, was one of the most excoriating things your Playbook author has read in a long time.”

“And now we have KJP’s ‘Chotiner moment,’ the inevitably catastrophic New Yorker Q&A in which participants are routinely hoisted by their own petard.”