The “CBS Mornings” panel was completely flabbergasted by Karine Jean-Pierre on Monday after the former White House press secretary defended Joe Biden’s apparent mental decline while also stating that she didn’t notice it while under his camp.
The moment happened on Monday’s segment while CBS’s Tony Dokoupil was discussing his initial reaction to Jean-Pierre’s new book “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” which assesses the nation’s two-party system and details Jean-Pierre’s time serving under Biden.
Dokoupil shared that rather than her coming to Biden’s defense, he thought — based on the book’s title — that she was going to reveal that she was “angry” that Biden’s mental decline was holding him back from following through with the 2024 Presidential Election.
“But mostly, what you said in this book, is you were angry at the people who tried to push him out,” Dokoupil said. “Some Americans are going to say: ‘Seriously!?’”
For Jean-Pierre, she explained that her frustration came from the Democratic Party turning on Biden and its subsequent collapse, which she said inspired her book’s creation.
“But not just the party that pushed him out, the party as it’s behaving today in this moment when we need a Democratic Party to be fighting, to be an opposition party,” Jean-Pierre said.
Co-host Gayle King jumped in to piggyback off Dokoupil’s astonishment, further questioning Jean-Pierre about how she never noticed Biden’s mental capacity was diminishing, especially as one of his closest staffers.
“You said people said why didn’t members of his inner circle speak up about what many believe was the apparent decline of Joe Biden,” King said. “You said you are a member of the inner circle, and you never saw the decline. And after that, I wrote: ‘How!?’ You even write, Karine, that you were on the plane with him going to the debate, and you didn’t see anything. It’s so hard to understand!”
Jean-Pierre insisted she only saw Biden after his poor performance against Trump during their 2024 debate.
“When we were on Air Force One going to the debate … his campaign people were on the team, his family was on the team,” Jean-Pierre explained. “[It] actually was one of those rare trips where I didn’t really see him until after the debate even though I was on the plane … 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%. We’ve always said, we’re not going to say, ‘Oh, he didn’t age.’ He aged. He poked fun at it. We always owned up. And with age, comes what happens when you get older.”
She then continued, reiterating that every time she was with Biden, he was always “engaged.”
“I never saw anyone who wasn’t there. I saw someone who was always engaged,” Jean-Pierre said. “I saw someone who understood policy, pushed us on the policy, and also understood history.”
