“Has the president been treated for Parkinson’s?” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, asked herself. “No,” she answered.
She was midway through the Monday afternoon press briefing, facing fire from all quarters. Reporters wanted to know if she had misled them about a medical check-up President Biden had after what is now apparently referred to, colloquially, as “that disastrous debate”.
They wanted to know about his brain. Most of all, they wanted to know if a Parkinson’s expert, whose name appears eight times in White House visitor logs over the eight months to this March, was there to see the leader of the free world.
Such was the onslaught that occasionally Jean-Pierre began to ask herself a few questions. “Is the president being treated for Parkinson’s?” she asked. “No,” she answered again. Nobody else had asked it, or at least not in that way. It said something about her predicament that this was the question she wanted to answer.
In the front row, a mild-mannered chap from the Associated Press wondered if Jean-Pierre could “state, very clearly, yes or no, was that expert here to participate in anything surrounding the care of the president of the United States?”
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She could not. “I just want to take another step back,” Jean-Pierre replied. Her hands moved, drawing pictures in the air. Occasionally she turned sideways. She looked like a goalkeeper in a penalty shoot out, trying to throw off a striker. She did her best, but the goal mouth gaped behind her and the shots kept on coming.
Jean-Pierre, 49, has been the press secretary for two years. Donald Trump seemed to go through them like napkins; Biden has had only two so far, though he has also called upon a navy admiral and state department veteran named John Kirby, a foreign policy guy whose steadily expanding role at Jean-Pierre’s press briefings has led to suggestions that she is being upstaged.
To remind everyone that it is her show, she hovers behind him, choosing who should be allowed to ask him questions. This, according to reports, irritates him.
Monday’s briefing began some 50 minutes late. Jean-Pierre came bouncing up the stairs, clad in a crisp white blazer. “Happy Monday!” she said, her tone bright but brittle. “It’s going to be a great week!” She had a lot of things to say, she said, before she would take questions. “Just warning you all — no falling asleep please.”
There seemed little chance of that. But perhaps she had just been talking to the president, whose nap times and reported efforts to avoid appointments after 8pm made headlines all weekend.
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The boss had been very busy lately, she insisted: “President Biden has been hitting the road.” He had been to six states. He held an event for Independence Day last week “with active-duty military service members and their families”. She stressed the “active” in that sentence: it made the president sound active too. This week, after a Nato summit, he would be holding “a big boy press conference”, she said.
This was an inside joke, between her and the White House press corps. One of them, a tricky fellow from Bloomberg, had asked last week if the president would hold a “real, big boy press conference”.
Jean-Pierre said it now, showing that she was in on the joke. Though it also recalled the first lady’s vaguely infantilising encouragement of the president, after “that disastrous debate”, when she said: “Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question, you knew all the facts.”
After this preamble, Jean-Pierre made way to allow Kirby to take questions about Nato. At one point he turned to her, to ask if they were really calling it “a big boy press conference”. It seemed that they were.
A reporter from CBS asked Kirby if he had ever seen the president, in meetings, “appear similarly to the way he did on debate night?” Kirby did his best. At one point, he even took off his thick-framed glasses, as if he were Clark Kent preparing for some heroics.
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“What I saw in that debate is not reflective of the man and the leader and the commander-in-chief that I have spent many, many hours with over the last two and a half years,” he said. “Heck, just this morning he was asking me questions about the situation on the European continent that I couldn’t answer! I told him I had to get back to him.”
When Kirby stepped down, Jean-Pierre returned to the microphone, like a condemned prisoner to the firing squad. “Okay!” she said. “Well! All the debate questions have been answered! Let me close my book and get out of here!” It was another joke. The press corps were just getting started.
Had she misled them about Biden not having a medical check-up after the debate? She said she had learnt later that he had a verbal check-in with a medic, not a “medical exam”. “Guys! Guys! Guys!” she said, as voices in the gallery rose. Biden had check-ups several times a week, often “while he’s exercising”, she said — raising the helpful idea of Biden exercising. While he was pumping iron, she might have added. While he was doing his usual 100 pull-ups.
What about the Parkinson’s expert, asked the man from the Associated Press.
Jean-Pierre said she could not say why the expert was there. Many military personnel came to the White House clinic for treatment, she said. “I’m not going to share people’s names from here … But the president, I can tell you, has seen a neurologist three times.”
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She began to read from a report in February. “There were no findings which would be consistent with any cerebellar … or other neurological disorders such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s or ascending lateral sclerosis.”
Another reporter asked if the president had been checked for hydrocephalus, “a build-up of fluid in the brain”. Jean-Pierre looked momentarily bewildered. Kirby could not help her with this one. She did not need a foreign policy wonk, she needed a neurologist.
Another reporter asked about an apparently impromptu interview the president had given that morning, calling in to the breakfast show Morning Joe. The presenters had looked slightly stunned. Had the president been reading from a script?
“The president spoke from his heart,” Jean-Pierre replied. “There was no script at all.” Once or twice he had read out quotes from the debate, she said. But otherwise it was pure, undiluted Biden.
“It was about 18 minutes!” she added. It sounded like a boast. The man could go on and on! “I think it was incredibly powerful.”
