The Washington Post slammed former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s new book in a blistering review published Wednesday.
The Post’s book critic, Becca Rothfeld, offered a scathing take on Jean-Pierre’s memoir about her time working for former President Joe Biden, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” dismissing it as a personal airing of grievances against the Democratic Party.
“Jean-Pierre’s central complaint boils down, more or less, to a vague sense of personal grievance. The Democrats were mean to Biden, her boss; they were mean to her personally, as she outlines in a lengthy diatribe against fellow staffers who leaked unflattering information about her to Politico; and they were mean to Harris, whom they refused to anoint as the nominee without a fight,” Rothfeld wrote.
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“Indeed, at no point in ‘Independent’ does she articulate a serious critique of Democratic policies,” the critic added. “Instead, in an unsubtle attempt to elevate her gripes to the status of more principled objections, she peppers the book with platitudes about the need to ‘tap into out of the box thinking’ and reject ‘an out-of-touch leadership working from an outdated playbook.’”
In her book, published Tuesday, Jean Pierre said she couldn’t “stomach” the party’s treatment of the former president and its efforts to force him out of the 2024 race. After a long career as a Democratic Party flack, Jean-Pierre suddenly left the party earlier this year, drawing ridicule from both sides of the aisle.
Rothfeld said that there were many issues Jean-Pierre could have named as the problems with her party, but she chose to call out its treatment of Biden — something Rothfeld argued was not a real issue, and maybe one of the Democratic Party’s more “sensible” strategies in recent memory.
She wrote that rather than call out the party for its support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, its failure to mount meaningful opposition to President Donald Trump, its inability to protect immigrants and expand access to healthcare, the official went after “the single sensible — if very belated — thing they have done in recent memory, which was to usher a doddering Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race.”
Rothfeld added, “These contortions are hard to imagine from anyone but the most devoted apparatchik, which is exactly what Karine Jean-Pierre is.”
The critic went on to call Jean-Pierre’s work dated and tone-deaf.
“It was dated before it arrived at the printers, perhaps before it was even written; no doubt it will be studied by the historians and anthropologists of the future,” she wrote. “Jean-Pierre is an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.”
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Rothfeld mocked Jean-Pierre’s decision to become an independent, writing that the move appeared to be more style than strategy.
“For her, becoming an independent seems to be less of a strategy than a style. ‘Independent’ is a primer in the rhetorical tactics that have served Democrats so poorly of late, full of squishy and congratulatory therapy-speak.”
“Ultimately, she tells her fellow independents, ‘we’re leaning into our own truth.’ Worse, she assures them, ‘it’s also about self-care,’” Rothfeld added. “She could often be mistaken for a motivational instructor in a Soul Cycle class… It is incredible — and emblematic of the Democrats’ total aesthetic and intellectual driftlessness — that someone who writes in such feel-good, thought-repelling clichés was hired to communicate with the nation from its highest podium.”
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Representatives for Jean-Pierre did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.