Karine Jean-Pierre and a Book Tour Most Authors Would Not Dream Of

White House press secretaries are supposed to know how to talk to the press. But that has not been evident this week for Karine Jean-Pierre, whose publicity tour for “Independent,” her book about her time behind the briefing room podium of the Biden White House, has gone viral, and not in a good way.

It is possible, of course, that the adage that all publicity is good publicity will prove true and result in spectacular sales for her book, subtitled “A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.”

But so far Ms. Jean-Pierre, who as Mr. Biden’s press secretary relied heavily on talking points although without the insults from the podium common today, has come across in interviews as erratic and defensive rather than as a forceful champion for her old boss.

Her attempts to defend him have come at a difficult time for Democrats, who are not eager to revisit the debacle of last year. Her message has not been well received.

Along the way she has struggled to answer questions. Exhibit A was an interview published on Monday with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, which has been described as “an absolute train wreck” (New York magazine) and “an excruciating case study in denial” (Peter Meijer, a former Republican congressman from Michigan). Others termed it embarrassing and incoherent.

In the book, Ms. Jean-Pierre writes that she became an independent in June because she was upset by the way the Democratic Party had pushed former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. out of the 2024 race. But in her interview with Mr. Chotiner, her explanation of her thinking devolved into a word salad that left him, and many readers, perplexed.

Asked why she thought the party had given Mr. Biden the boot, Ms. Jean-Pierre, the first Black and openly gay White House press secretary, responded: “There’s more to this than just that period of time. This is very layered, right? There’s a period of time that I questioned what was happening and how do we treat our own, how do we treat people who are decent people? And then you also have to think about how I’m thinking about this as a Black woman who is part of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and living in this time where I also don’t think Democrats right now, Democrats’ leadership, is protecting vulnerable people in the way that it should.”

“Sorry, I’m not trying to be dense,” Mr. Chotiner responded. “I’m a little unclear about what this has to do with Democratic leaders and many Democrats in the country thinking that Joe Biden was going to lose to Donald Trump.”

At another point in the interview, Mr. Chotiner asked Ms. Jean-Pierre why she had written in the book that it was an “insult” to former Vice President Kamala Harris that people didn’t want her to be the nominee when she also wrote that “the truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.”

Ms. Jean-Pierre responded: “But two things could be true, right? The thing I say the second time actually proves the thing that I said the first time, right?”

Ms. Jean-Pierre’s publicists said she was not available for an interview on Wednesday, but offered a statement from her that said in part: “The focus of my book, ‘Independent,’ is to start a conversation about how we move forward as a country, how we preserve our democracy and fix a broken system that if not attended to will lead us into what some are already calling an authoritarian regime.’’

Ms. Jean-Pierre, who was the senior adviser and national spokeswoman for Moveon.org and a political analyst for MSNBC before becoming a White House press secretary, made a big splash when she assumed the job. She appeared in a spread in Vogue, received effusive coverage in the gay press (“7 Times White House’s Karine Jean-Pierre Was a Total Badass,” read a headline in The Advocate) and projected the image of a fresh new personality behind the White House podium.

In her statement, she said that “while I understand there are some who want to distract from this important conversation by discussing my performance as White House press secretary — and whether I deserved to be in the role — rather than about my book, I won’t be distracted by that chatter.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Chotiner declined to speak about the substance of the New Yorker interview. But he did offer a few words about the general chemistry of his Q&A with Ms. Jean-Pierre, which was done over the phone.

“It wasn’t a tense interview to conduct,” he said. “And she seemed very nice.”

Reporters who covered the Biden White House often described Ms. Jean-Pierre as a pleasant person who treated them with respect, but they also said there had been moments when she had not seemed fully informed by her colleagues on policy or major decisions. Her performance at times raised questions about whether she was emblematic of the Biden administration’s problems rather than anything resembling a solution to them.

After the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Ms. Jean-Pierre often shared the podium with John F. Kirby. A retired Navy admiral who had worked at the Pentagon and State Department, Mr. Kirby was far more comfortable and better versed in foreign affairs than Ms. Jean-Pierre, who resented the intrusion. In her book, she writes that an unnamed White House official — widely considered to be Anita Dunn — tried to push her aside, and that she wanted an unnamed man who had experience in war-torn regions — presumably Mr. Kirby — to go on a trip to Israel in her place.

In another interview, last week, Gayle King of “CBS Mornings” was openly skeptical of Ms. Jean-Pierre for writing that she had never seen signs of Mr. Biden’s decline. “You even write, Karine, that you were on the plane with him going to the debate, and you didn’t see anything,” Ms. King said, referring to Mr. Biden’s halting, fumbling debate performance with Donald Trump in June 2024 that led to Mr. Biden’s withdrawal from the race three and a half weeks later.

Ms. Jean-Pierre responded that she had not happened to see Mr. Biden on the flight. “With age comes what happens when you get older,” she said, adding that “I never saw anyone who wasn’t there. I saw someone who was always engaged.”

In another curious moment in Ms. Jean-Pierre’s interview with Mr. Chotiner, she said that her subtitle about a “broken White House” referred to the Trump White House, not the one she had worked in. “The book for me is really about the moment that we’re in,” she said.

At another point she told Mr. Chotiner that “you’re telling me about the feelings of Joe Biden, blah, blah, blah, but Joe Biden is out of the picture. He’s out of the picture.”

“Yeah, he sure is,” Mr. Chotiner responded.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.