Tuesday’s White House press briefing demonstrated a clear contrast between how Fox News’ Peter Doocy and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre interacted. To start off, Jean-Pierre warmly conversed with the departing NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker, noting that “we will miss you and we are incredibly thrilled and excited for you in your new adventure”. Soon after, Doocy intruded on the pleasantries with a hard-hitting question on President Biden’s age and his refusal to visit East Palestine, Ohio.
Doocy began to challenge Jean-Pierre by asking, “President Biden is the oldest President in U.S. history. Why does White House staff treat him like a baby?” Unimpressed, Jean-Pierre responded with a scoff, saying, “No one treats the President of the United States, the commander-in-chief, like a baby. That’s ridiculous. That’s a ridiculous claim.” Doocy continued to press, providing context that the question was drawn from a book’s excerpt claiming that President Biden “fumed to friends about how he was treated like a toddler.” in response, Jean-Pierre defended the staff of the White House, affirming that “they did see the excerpt — the context of the excerpt and it seemed to be making the opposite, overall point about how the value of his experience and wisdom resulted in rallying the free world against authoritarianism, which is important.”
Doocy followed this up with a query about why two-thirds of Democrats think President Biden is too old to run again, according to the Wall Street Journal poll. To this query, Jean-Pierre offered a rehearsed answer, proclaiming “there’s…always a range of books that are — about every administration, as you know, that’s going to have a variety of claims” before going on to say that “[Biden] has wisdom…experience,” and has “taken historic action and has delivered historic pieces of legislation.”
Having presented Jean-Pierre with two difficult questions to answer, Doocy then asked her why President Biden had failed to visit East Palestine Ohio since “The derailment was on February 3”. Taking offense, Jean-Pierre asserted that “the President will go to East Palestine. He promised that he would and he will” before contradicting her previous statement by stating that “the President was not on a break when he was in Lake Tahoe”. Visibly flustered by Doocy’s line of inquiry, Jean-Pierre concluded her answer by insisting that “the President is going to go to East Palestine. I don’t have a time or date to announce at this time, but he will go.”
The stark contrast between Doocy’s relentless cross-examination and Jean-Pierre’s pandering to Welker as she departed was demonstrative of the kind of relationship between the press and the White House and one suspects that Jean-Pierre’s answers are not the last media spectators will hear from the Biden administration on the issues Doocy raised.