'That's Ridiculous': WH Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Slams Fox News for Asking Why Staff Treats Biden 'Like a Baby'
Sept. 5 2023, Published 6:25 p.m. ET
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre didn't try to hide her feelings about a Fox News reporter's "ridiculous" question about how staff treat Joe Biden, RadarOnline.com has learned.
Fox News' Peter Doocy fanned flames at Tuesday's press briefing when he asked the press secretary why staff had to treat Biden, 80, "like a baby."
Doocy began his line of question by riffing off a passage from The Atlantic's Franklin Foer's new book, The Last Politician.
"President Biden is the oldest president in U.S. history. Why does White House staff treat him like a baby?" the Fox News reporter asked Jean-Pierre.
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The press secretary immediately fired back, "No one treats the President of the United States, the commander in chief, like a baby."
"That’s ridiculous," Biden's press secretary continued. "It’s a ridiculous claim."
Doocy continued to call out questions based on The Last Politician's contents — and Jean-Pierre continued to knock down the "claims."
Jean-Pierre dismissed the "variety of claims" from the book and acknowledged that the Biden administration was aware of Foer's writing.
"We 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," she quipped back.
"You all have seen this — and passage of the most historic agenda in most recent history, handling of the foreign policy like rallying the world around Ukraine as you have heard from our national security adviser who laid out in really good questions that your colleagues asked about how the president is moving forward."
In an excerpt obtained by Axios, Foer detailed Biden's alleged explosive response to his staffers after he went off-script last year and said Vladimir Putin "cannot remain in power."
"[Biden] knew that he had erred, but then resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess," Foer wrote in The Last Politician. "Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler. Was John Kennedy ever babied like that?"
Jean-Pierre wasn't the only one who found Doocy's questions "ridiculous." An unlikely source of criticism came from Steve Krakauer on X, formerly Twitter.
"These are not good questions," Krakauer wrote on X in a post that featured a video of Doocy and Jean-Pierre's exchange. "They’re intentionally antagonistic and are not designed to actually elicit substantive answers."
Krakauer added, "The public is not served by exchanges like this."