During Thursday’s White House press conference, outgoing White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki congratulated her successor, Karine Jean-Pierre, marking a historic passing of the torch as the 44-year-old will be the first black person and the first openly LGBT+ person to hold the position. .
But that wasn’t the only historic exchange documented in Brady’s newsroom Thursday.
Fox News’ Peter Doocy, who has a well-earned reputation for being a thorn in Ms. Psaki’s side, frequently pestering her with questions that have, at times, inflamed and annoyed the seemingly unflappable press secretary, decided to break up with tradition this week and said something you probably never expected to hear: a compliment.
“Thank you, Jen,” the Fox News reporter said when called during the briefing, which is likely to be one of Ms. Psaki’s last before she passes the torch to Ms. Jean-Pierre on May 13.
“I’m sorry he’s leaving,” he added, a comment that notably caught more of Ms. Psaki off guard, as the roomful of reporters paused to take in what the frequent Biden administration antagonist had just said.
“It’s you?” a smiling Ms. Psaki replied, while the spectators watching this unusually cool exchange burst into laughter.
Waiting a moment for the giggles to return, Mr. Doocy squeaked back that “yes” he was sad, adding, “You’ve always been a good sport.”
“So on behalf of everyone, thank you for everything,” he added, while Ms Psaki interrupted that she, too, believed he had been a good sport.
“And I can’t wait to see you up there, Karine,” he closed, before moving on to his question.
This week’s praise between the pair, while seemingly genuine, was a sharp departure from what audiences inside Brady’s newsroom received over the course of Ms. Psaki’s tenure at the lectern for the past 17 months.
As recently as last month, Ms. Psaki was arguing with the Fox News reporter, discussing on a podcast whether his questions made him “sound like a stupid son of a f****.”
“He works for a network that provides people with questions that — nothing personal to anyone, including Peter Doocy — but can make anyone sound like a stupid son of an ab,” he said during a recording of the podcast. can save the world.
In one of her first kicks, the reporter set the tone for what the next year and a half would look like between the pair when she asked Ms. Psaki about the Biden administration’s coronavirus travel bans in January 2021, comparing the bans of his current boss with the highly criticized travel pans of his predecessor.
“When President Trump imposed travel restrictions in March, specifically on China, candidate Biden called it ‘xenophobic’ and ‘inspiring fear,’” Doocy asked. “Now, President Biden is putting travel restrictions on people coming from other countries. What word do we use to describe that?”
Ms. Psaki quickly corrected this assessment as not being a “fair articulation” of the president’s policies, noting that he had described Trump’s Muslim travel ban as xenophobic and said earlier that the former president’s travel bans to China during the first part of the pandemic were stigmatizing.
The pattern has been more or less the same in recent months, with Ms. Psaki at times berating the reporter, once saying, “Let me give you the facts here, I know it can be inconvenient,” and at other times giving more tongue-in-cheek responses to questions she deemed not so relevant: “Presidents don’t drive much,” she once said when prompted by Doocy to say that the president doesn’t own an electric car.
Ms Psaki is believed to start a position with MSNBC’s streaming service Peacock after her departure from the White House.
Before coming to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in 2020, she worked as a political commentator at CNN, a role she took on in 2017 after working in the Obama administration as White House communications director.
Reference-www.independent.co.uk