Karine Jean-Pierre Challenges Joe And Kamala For White House Gaffe Machine Award

Since their inauguration, President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris have been neck-and-neck in a competition for who can do the most damage every time they open their mouths to speak. It’s a tight race. After Biden pulled ahead last Wednesday by asking, “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?” from the stage as he looked for Rep. Jackie Walorski, a Republican who tragically died in a car accident in August, Harris regained her lead by touting the United States’ “alliance with the Republic of North Korea” the very next day.

But there’s another contestant for the Most Likely To Mess Up The Alphabet Song award in the White House employee yearbook. It’s the person whose job, you might think, exists to make the aforementioned stars of the White House blooper reel look better, to explain their mistakes, and to convey their intended messaging. It’s the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre — but instead of helping her bosses out, KJP seems to be taking lessons from them instead.

Walorski Was on Biden’s Mind So Much, He Forgot She Died

Jean-Pierre took Biden’s embarrassing “where’s Jackie?” flub and made it worse last week. Instead of a simple admission that the president misspoke and an apology to the Walorski family — which Biden finally offered to them at the White House last Friday — Jean-Pierre demanded her listeners believe that it was totally logical for the president to call out to a deceased person.

“She was on his mind, she was of top of mind for the president,” Jean-Pierre insisted.

When pressed as to why, “if the late congresswoman was top of mind for the president … why was he looking for her?” Jean-Pierre doubled down. “I think people can understand … when someone is at top of mind,” she said. “I don’t think it’s all that unusual.”

“I feel like many of us have gone through that particular time where someone is on top of mind and you call them out and you mention” them, she said again, failing to recognize that most of us have never thought about someone so much that we forgot she died. “I don’t find that confusing.”

‘Nordstrom 1’

Earlier this month, Jean-Pierre told reporters that Russia had “shut down the pipeline of Nordstrom 1,” apparently mistaking the name of the Nord Stream pipeline for that of a department store.

Ten Thousand Million New Jobs!

Only days before her “Nordstrom” gaffe, the White House press secretary boasted that the administration had created “ten thousand million jobs.”

“We have created nearly ten thousand million jobs since President Biden took office,” she bragged, “so you’re asking me where is the success, here it is.” Not only is “ten thousand million” an improper way to say 10 billion, but — if that is what she meant — that would be 60 times the total number of people in America’s civilian workforce.

Biden Only Said Covid Is Over Because He Was Looking at Cars

After the president unequivocally declared that “the pandemic is over,” instead of standing by the remark — a sentiment with which millions of Americans agree — Jean-Pierre tried to convince MSNBC listeners that Biden only said what he did because he was looking at cars.

“He was walking through the Detroit car show, the halls of the Detroit car show, and he was looking around,” was her non sequitur explanation for why Biden said what he did.

Biden Working to ‘Elevate’ Pain at Gas Pump

About a month into her new role as press secretary, Jean-Pierre made a Freudian slip when she said her boss was going to “elevate” the pain Americans are enduring from rising gas prices.

“The president has been very clear in making sure that he does everything that he can, uh, to, uh, to elevate — to alleviate — the, you know, the pain that American families are feeling when it comes to gas prices,” she stumbled, as gas prices hovered just below a national average of $5 per gallon.

When She Got GOP and Democrat Positions on Border Security Confused

A few weeks ago, Jean-Pierre apparently thought reporters wouldn’t notice if she completely flip-flopped which political party advocates for stronger border security and which one doesn’t. After a reporter pointed out that “we’re on track to close the fiscal year with 2 million encounters, breaking last year’s record, [and] in the last month alone fentanyl seizures were up 200 percent, and we’re on pace to break that record also this year,” the press secretary pretended Democrats have always been the party of securing the southern border.

“We’re certainly doing a lot more [than former President Donald Trump] to secure the border and could be doing even more if Republicans would stop their obstruction,” she said, failing to explain how Biden’s attempts to end rules such as Title 42 and the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy do anything but make the border crisis worse.

Jean-Pierre hasn’t publicly forgotten the death of someone she released a statement mourning, or accidentally aligned herself with Kim Jong-un — yet. But she’s already doing a great job showing solidarity with her gaffe-prone bosses, and if she keeps it up, she just might beat them at their own game.

Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.

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