White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt laid the blame for her predecessor's struggles squarely at the feet of former President Joe Biden.
Speaking Thursday at George Washington University during a sitdown with Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk, Leavitt argued that Karine Jean-Pierre's rocky tenure behind the podium was less about Jean-Pierre herself and more about a boss who kept his own spokesperson in the dark.
"I saw my predecessor in this role have a bit of a hard time, I think, and I think it's because she wasn't able to communicate with her boss in a very open and transparent way."
It was a pointed observation, and a generous one. Leavitt didn't take the easy shot at Jean-Pierre's competence. She went after the system that set her up to fail.
Leavitt's remarks weren't just retrospective criticism. They were a frame for how she described her own working relationship with President Trump. Where Biden was walled off, Trump is accessible. Where Jean-Pierre was left guessing, Leavitt said she never has to.
"He just lays it on the table. There's no guessing. There's no questioning. There's no spin. It just is what it is with him."
She described Trump's directness as something that makes her job fundamentally easier, calling his accessibility and transparency "so refreshing," not just for the West Wing staff but for the American people and the press corps.
"Everything he says is exactly how he feels. There's no guessing, and he's honest and authentic about what he believes, and it makes my job much easier."
That last line lands differently when you consider what the alternative looked like.
Jean-Pierre replaced Jen Psaki as press secretary in 2022 and served until Biden left office. By virtually every account, those years were brutal. She was often criticized for sticking rigidly to talking points, seeming unprepared, and dispensing little information during briefings. According to previous reporting by The Post, she was viewed as incompetent by many in the West Wing itself, including senior Biden aides who tried unsuccessfully to coax her out of the role in late 2023.
That's a remarkable detail. Biden's own people wanted her gone and couldn't make it happen.
But here's the deeper problem Leavitt identified: Jean-Pierre wasn't freelancing badly. She was executing a strategy of concealment. Biden was reportedly shielded by a small, tight-knit group of advisers at the White House, dubbed the "politburo" according to the book "Original Sin." He rarely gave interviews. He rarely took questions from the press. The entire communications apparatus was built around limiting exposure, not increasing clarity.
Jean-Pierre herself acknowledged during testimony before the House Oversight Committee last year that talking points were given to her by "various advisers" relating to President Biden's health and mental acuity. She wasn't crafting the message. She was reading it.
This is where Leavitt's point carries real weight. A press secretary's job is to communicate the president's thinking, priorities, and decisions to the American public. When the president is hidden behind a palace guard of advisers, when his own health is a topic his spokesperson is handed scripted lines about, the role becomes something else entirely. It becomes damage control dressed up as transparency.
Jean-Pierre announced last year that she was no longer a Democrat, citing the party's treatment of her former boss. That's a telling exit. She didn't repudiate the job or the administration's goals. She repudiated the people around it. The same people, it seems, who made her position untenable while she held it.
None of this absolves Jean-Pierre of her own shortcomings at the podium. But it does clarify the environment she operated in. You cannot be transparent on behalf of someone who refuses to be.
The Biden White House treated information like a liability. Every briefing was an exercise in saying as little as possible while appearing to say something. That wasn't a communications failure. It was a communications strategy, one designed to protect a president whose own staff apparently doubted his capacity to speak for himself.
Leavitt's description of the Trump White House is the inverse. A president who picks up the phone when reporters call. A president who says what he thinks without a committee sanitizing it first. A press secretary who doesn't need a binder full of approved deflections because she knows what her boss actually believes. "That's one of the things I love most about the job."
When a press secretary says the best part of the job is knowing what the president thinks, it tells you something. It also tells you what the last press secretary didn't have.