Jen Psaki, President Biden’s current Press Secretary, leaves her job on Friday. During a breakfast with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, she looked back at her 15 months on the job.
In that time, she’s held 224 press briefings, and Friday will mark her 225th. That’s more than Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany held, combined. The four, COUNT THEM 4, Trump press secretaries did a total of 205 briefings during Trump’s entire presidency.
The curve is slightly thrown off by Grisham, who held none. Your humble author happened to graduate with Grisham at the same high school and was not surprised, especially after Grisham’s multiple DUI charges.
Unfortunately, we didn’t get any lasting gems from Psaki. At least, nothing like Sean Spicer’s insistence that Trump’s inauguration was the most attended ever, “period.” Nothing like Sanders getting kicked out of a restaurant for being a notorious liar. Nothing like McEnany claiming that the tear gas and rubber bullets everyone saw used on protesters didn’t exist.
Mostly what we got from Jen Psaki was a little light sarcasm and a bunch of spin-free press briefings.
Psaki went on in the interview to tell reporters that some of it had been frightening. Unlike her predecessors, she sometimes got death threats, and some of those with her children’s names on them:
The thing that has been hardest personally is I have had threats. I have had nasty letters, texts to me with my personal address, the names of my children. It crosses lines, you know, and that’s when it becomes a little scary.
Psaki’s replacement will be Karine Jean-Pierre, the first black person, and first openly gay person to serve as Press Secretary.
It’s hard to follow in the footsteps of someone as forthcoming and intelligent as Jen Psaki, but we have no doubt that Jean-Pierre will be able to fill those shoes.
Let’s hope we never have to go back to the days of waiting for the president to do a rally to get the news out of the White House.