In June 2019, Karine Jean-Pierre was moderating a forum for presidential candidates when a protester rushed the stage. It’s a famous video: Finding herself seated between the oncoming protester and then senator Kamala Harris, Jean-Pierre leapt to her feet, raised a hand, and turned her body to face him—a five-foot-two one-woman blockade to the future vice president of the United States. On Morning Joe later that week, cohost Willie Geist marveled at her courage: “I know who I want moderating my next panel.”
At the time, Jean-Pierre, who had worked in the Obama administration, was the chief public affairs officer for MoveOn.org and a political pundit. Her next moves would be swift: In 2020 she joined the Biden campaign as a senior adviser and later became Harris’s chief of staff. About a year and a half into the Biden presidency, she was introduced as the White House press secretary—the first Black person and first openly gay person to hold the position.
Jean-Pierre is a realist. For all the history she’s made in her career, she expects she will best be remembered for her fracas with the protester that went viral. “It’s going to be on my tombstone,” she says, with cheery resignation. The day after the onstage clash, Harris called Jean-Pierre to see how she was holding up. “How I was doing!” Jean-Pierre remembers. “I said, ‘Please get security.’ She was like, ‘I’m calling to check in on you!’ ” But Jean-Pierre repeated herself. Get security.
That quality of directness—blunt, with a touch of compassion—is Jean-Pierre’s currency at the briefing podium. She meets the White House press corps almost daily—favoring bright colors and bold eye shadow when she does—and, while she’s more reserved than some of her predecessors and less likely to respond to provocation with a social media–ready retort, she has sharpened her own technique: disarm with a smile, then lay out the facts at hand.
In one example, when House Republicans earlier this year prepared to block the president’s plan on student-debt relief, Jean-Pierre, 48—who has been open about the debt she accrued in graduate school (some $25,000, despite a partial scholarship)—kept her feelings in check. “Will Marjorie Taylor Greene, who had $183,000 of her own business loans forgiven, vote to deny debt relief to the 92,000 student borrowers she represents?” Jean-Pierre wondered aloud. “Will Representative Vern Buchanan, who had over $2.3 million of business loans forgiven, vote to deny student debt relief for 95,000 of his own constituents?”
President Biden has emphasized to Jean-Pierre that when she speaks, her audience is as much the American people as it is the press corps, and so that afternoon she went on: “To the more than 40 million eligible student borrowers who are eagerly waiting to learn about the fate of their debt relief, I urge you to tune in to today’s vote to watch which Republican lawmakers shamelessly vote against debt relief for you—after having their own loans forgiven.”
Jean-Pierre never planned to work in politics. Born in Martinique to Haitian parents, she moved with her mother and father to Paris as a baby, and then to New York, where relatives had settled in Queens Village. Later, they landed in Long Island. Her sister, Edrine, was born when she was seven. Her brother, Chris, arrived not long after. (Her parents also had a son named Donald, who died before Jean-Pierre was born.) Jean-Pierre couldn’t read until the third grade. Her parents—consumed with multiple jobs—had assumed she would learn in school. She did not.
Determined to help her siblings avoid the same fate, Jean-Pierre set up a classroom in the basement when she was in middle school. Her brother remembers her teaching him not just how to read and write, but “how to articulate emotions, how to speak.” When her sister took dance classes, Jean-Pierre handled drop-off and pickup. It was about this time that her parents started handing her bills to decipher. “I was like the third parent,” she says. “I had big responsibilities.”
But fulfilling those obligations meant learning to compartmentalize. In her memoir, Moving Forward: A Story of Hope, Hard Work, and the Promise of America, Jean-Pierre writes of silence as a tool of survival. She records instances of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a cousin. She didn’t tell her parents. (A relative noticed how she flinched when the cousin walked in the room, and put a stop to it.) She describes a suicide attempt in college: Her sister found her in her car with the exhaust on and shook her awake. Jean-Pierre threw her urine-soaked khakis in the trash and never discussed the incident—or what drove her to it—with her parents. She had known she was gay since childhood, but the book recounts only one agonizing attempt at coming out to her mother. (“I could see the revulsion on her face,” Jean-Pierre writes.) Decades would pass before she and Jean-Pierre discussed it again.
Track proved the perfect sport for someone looking to outrun her reality. In high school, Jean-Pierre joined the team. She became a standout cross-country runner, too, breaking records on Long Island. Her vegetarianism baffled her meat-eating parents and she briefly considered becoming a nun, the better to evade any question of romantic attraction. After graduation, she enrolled in the New York Institute of Technology—a private university on Long Island—and loaded up with pre-med classes. She trained as a volunteer firefighter, an experience that would prove useful in her eventual career in rapid response.
But her MCAT scores were terrible and it was clear that medical school was not in her future. She was still living with her parents, with no idea of what she would do next. Washington brims with driven, sometimes Machiavellian strivers. Jean-Pierre spent the first half of her 20s taking temp jobs. She worked for a spell at Estée Lauder. She took a gig in conservation, protecting the nests of piping plovers. In 2001 she enrolled at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, thinking she might pursue environmental studies. The week she began classes, the Twin Towers fell.
Jean-Pierre studied under the urban policy expert Ester Fuchs, PhD, whose class told a narrative of American progress. “The view essentially was, ‘Okay, our institutions work,’ ” Fuchs says. Jean-Pierre—one of two Black women in the course—wasn’t so sure. “She asked the hard questions,” Fuchs says. “Her concern was always for what we call the promise of America. She believed in it, but she saw where it wasn’t working.”
Jean-Pierre came to understand politics as a remedy. After graduation, she worked for New York City Council members. In 2007 she headed for North Carolina to work for presidential candidate John Edwards and met Jen O’Malley Dillon, his deputy campaign manager. When Edwards’s run imploded, O’Malley Dillon moved to Barack Obama’s staff and offered Jean-Pierre a job.
“Karine and I grew up together in the business,” says O’Malley Dillon, now President Biden’s deputy chief of staff. “It makes me sound like the oldest lady in the world, but when we were first starting out, there weren’t as many women leaders and there certainly weren’t women of color at the level that Karine is at now.”
Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s longtime adviser and now CEO of his foundation, has known Jean-Pierre nearly as long. “I think she’s prepared her entire career for the moment she’s in right now,” she says.
These days, Jean-Pierre wakes up around 5 a.m. Her emails to me have pre-sunrise timestamps. “I’m not disciplined at all,” Jean-Pierre says. About balance, she means. She’s quite disciplined about work, from which she allows few distractions.
Jean-Pierre does not watch television. When she reads books, it’s bedtime stories. (Jean-Pierre shares her daughter, Soleil, with former CNN national correspondent Suzanne Malveaux. It was Malveaux who initiated the adoption process, not long after she and Jean-Pierre started dating. Now Soleil is nine, and Jean-Pierre’s mother has become a doting, obsessive grandparent.) Jean-Pierre does like musicals, and she and Soleil have taken in The Lion King, Wicked, and Once Upon a One More Time. She still runs when she can, and after three miles, her mind starts to clear.
Acknowledging that a nanny helps make the breakneck schedule possible, Jean-Pierre tells me she pulls into the White House at 7 a.m. Her first in person meeting is at 8:15 a.m., which Jeff Zients, White House chief of staff, hosts in his office. Jean-Pierre sits to one side. And when she speaks, he swivels. “While she’s humble, she’s got confidence in views that might sometimes run against where the team is heading,” he says. “I always pause because she’s probably onto something.”
A little after 9 a.m., Jean-Pierre settles behind her semicircular desk in the West Wing. Soleil is responsible for much of her office decor: a framed letter (“You are the best mom in the world”), a pink wood-block animal figurine (of indeterminate genus), and a doodle near two framed photos—one of Jean-Pierre with President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden, and one of her with President Obama.
From her perch, Jean-Pierre can see four TV screens broadcasting news networks. More shelves hold stacks of books, from bestsellers like Angela Duckworth’s Grit and Adam Grant’s Originals to Horse Barbie, Geena Rocero’s memoir of growing up as a trans pageant queen in the Philippines. Rocero inscribed it to Jean-Pierre during a visit to the White House.
There are memes about eldest sisters, and then there are the women who live them. Jean-Pierre is so organized her pens have their own coral pouch. A thin film keeps her Dell monitor pristine. Visible disorder in her office is limited to drooping flowers on a side table. Today, she’s wearing a vibrant orange sleeveless shift, with a rose gold Garmin watch strapped to her wrist. When I arrive, staffers have already started to filter in and out of her office in an exercise her team calls “prep,” but which is better characterized as a mix of college office hours and Talmudic exegesis.
Together with aides, Jean-Pierre takes stock of the latest economic signals, the status of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, and reports of extreme heat across the country—all with an eye toward fielding questions later that day. Some in the press corps have complained that Jean-Pierre reads too much from her binder—that she sounds rehearsed. That is because she rehearses. In prep, she chooses adjectives and verbs with fastidious care. Is defend the right word to describe Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s stance on education standards that seem to celebrate the skills that enslaved people learned in bondage? Or perhaps it’s more accurate—and more pointed—to put it like this: It demonstrates a lack of leadership. It’s an insult.
The team has drafted a statement on the issue, if Jean-Pierre is open to it. Like all updates to her binder, it is printed and hole-punched. (She dreams of a briefing iPad.) No office in America relies on hole punchers like this one does. In the event of a national confetti shortage, White House hole punchers can be requisitioned to release strategic reserves.
Can Jean-Pierre comment on Governor DeSantis from the podium? He is a candidate for president, so she has to be careful. A few months ago, Jean-Pierre was slapped with a Hatch Act violation for comments she made about “MAGA Republicans,” which the Office of Special Counsel, a government watchdog agency, said ran afoul of the federal ban on executive branch employees participating in campaign activity. So, she’s wary. But DeSantis is also an elected official.
In the end, Jean-Pierre criticizes “extreme officials in Florida and across the country” who are “shamefully promoting a lie that enslaved people actually benefited from slavery. It’s inaccurate, insulting. It’s hurtful and prevents an honest account of our nation’s history.”
ABC News picks up her statement—600 retweets, 2,500 likes, a quarter of a million views.
Before her current job, Jean-Pierre had been principal deputy to Jen Psaki—Biden’s first White House press secretary. The two were so close that Psaki got them matching leather briefing books, which Jean-Pierre christened “Ebony” and “Ivory.” Several times, Jean-Pierre filled in for Psaki at the podium or on overseas trips. “I gaggled more than Jen did,” Jean-Pierre says, referring to the informal, off-camera briefings the White House often holds on the road.
Still, there was no actual interview process in the lead-up to her promotion. News had already leaked that Psaki would leave for an anchor position at MSNBC, prompting speculation about a successor; Jean-Pierre was the obvious front-runner, and after a month, Biden called her into the Oval Office.
“It happened fast,” Jean-Pierre says. “The president and I had 20 seconds together.”
“I remember she described her feeling as shell-shocked,” Psaki says. “It’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience when the president of the United States asks you to do something.”
“You’re kind of like, ‘Were there supposed to be fireworks happening? Mood music?’ ” Jean-Pierre says now. “There was none of that.” The press release came out a few minutes later.
When Psaki eventually relinquished her office to Jean-Pierre, she left a note quoting a bit of advice she’d gotten from her own mother: “Keep your feet planted on the ground and your spine stiff.” She meant that this is not a job for anyone made of squishy stuff. “There’s a reason that press secretaries over the years have handed down a physical flak jacket,” says Ben LaBolt, White House communications director. “You tend to get a lot more criticism than you do praise.”
Jean-Pierre did get a lot of criticism, especially in the beginning. There were reportedly complaints from the press corps, who sniped about Jean-Pierre’s recitation of talking points and expressed genuine exasperation about her perceived stonewalling on basic questions. Things became particularly testy in early 2023 when Jean-Pierre was pressed on a cache of classified documents found at Biden’s Delaware home. She seemed to share incomplete information from the podium—so much so that NPR reporter Tamara Keith, who was then president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, questioned Jean-Pierre’s ability to do her job. “Are you upset that you came out to this podium…with incomplete and inaccurate information?” Keith asked. “And are you concerned that it affects your credibility up here?”
One media reporter who has covered Jean-Pierre’s tenure tells me that Democratic officials have been critical too. The public needs to understand what the administration has accomplished, the reporter points out, “and if you don’t have someone who’s really able to sell your message, that hurts the White House.”
The alternate view is that Jean-Pierre can only say as much as the White House counsel allows her to. “I take none of it personally,” is all Jean-Pierre will tell me, when I ask her about the attacks on her credibility. “I’m representing the president, so petty is just not on the menu.” She adds (and reporters I speak to confirm) that she has developed good personal relationships with many correspondents—even those with whom she has “intense back-and-forths,” as she puts it.
Fuchs—still a mentor—has noticed improvements in the year she’s been doing the job. “Her press conferences now are very different than they were when she started,” Fuchs says. “She’s figured out how to carry herself.”
Best of luck to would-be blackmailers: Jean-Pierre doesn’t drink coffee or alcohol. Psaki calls her viceless. Her snack is roasted seaweed or a morning banana smoothie made al-desko with a gadget called the BlendJet.
Before the briefing starts, she allows herself a matcha bubble tea and then rustles up a faded Beautyblender to touch up her makeup. When she hears a two-minute warning, she pops a mint, takes her watch off, and puts her heels on.
Briefings last about 45 minutes. This one includes queries about protests in Israel and a few about GOP maneuvers at the border. Afterward, Jean-Pierre and her staff have a 10-minute postmortem. Today, an aide reminds her to be firm on questions that deal with prospective interest rate hikes. She wants the team to feel comfortable critiquing her. “But also, I know if I’ve screwed up,” she says. “No one has to tell me.”
In fact, when she feels she has truly slipped, she is in the habit of processing aloud. Zients has come to expect a pop-in. “She’ll show up to share good news, which is fun, but also when things don’t feel quite right,” he says. “She’s open to new ideas, to feedback. You’ll see a bunch of people here who think, ‘You know what? I’m under such tremendous pressure. I’m working so hard. Why don’t you go try to do that?’ If she has that instinct, it never comes out.”
Jean-Pierre endures fairly ruthless, sometimes frightening treatment on social media—the part of the job that Psaki tells me “crosses the line.” Still, Jean-Pierre says she has never had a “nasty” encounter in public. “People who love me are concerned,” she admits. “But I do not walk around fearful for my life or my security. That is not something I worry about. I worry more for my daughter.”
The afternoon that I visit, Jean-Pierre leaves work earlier than usual to take Soleil to a local pool. It’s clear that this is all a juggle, and it has gotten more challenging lately. Jean-Pierre and Malveaux have separated. “I’m a single mom who is co-parenting this amazing kid,” Jean-Pierre says. “Our number-one priority is her privacy and to make sure we create an environment that’s nurturing.”
She and I drive through leafy suburbs and arrive in the still humid evening, as Jean-Pierre continues the conversation poolside. She nods toward Soleil, who is splashing in a sequined bathing suit. “We talk about her feelings all the time,” she says. “I ask her all the time, ‘Are you happy? How’s it going?’ And she’ll tell me.” Open communication is something Jean-Pierre is committed to. “That’s the nice part—being the parent that you wish you had,” she says. “My parents were amazing, but they were trying to survive.”
She never expected to be in this situation—mothering. Having a child was “a thousand percent” not on her to-do list. She spent so much of her own childhood helping to raise her siblings. Her work was a bid for freedom. “I think that’s one of the reasons I left to do campaigns,” Jean-Pierre says. “Because it took me away from the responsibilities of home.”
But it turns out being a parent has only made her more motivated. “Everything that we do, being led by the president, is going to matter, not just today, but tomorrow and for the rest of our lives,” she says. “What we do is certainly going to change the trajectory of her life.”
Recently, a cabinet member texted Jean-Pierre. (She declines to say which.) This official had been getting pilloried in the press, and Jean-Pierre had offered a strong defense from the podium. “They reached out to me and thanked me,” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s nice. You’re welcome.’ ”
Who does that for her? Her team, she says. She has champions outside the White House too. When a group of Black women came to see Harris not long ago, one of them sought out Jean-Pierre to say that “there are millions of us who want you to succeed.”
There are of course also millions who do not.
The week I visit, Fox News is obsessively covering a change in Jean-Pierre’s word choice regarding whether or not President Biden was involved with his son Hunter’s business dealings. Where once the line was that Biden had “never spoken” about foreign deals with Hunter, Jean-Pierre now tells reporters Hunter and his father were never “in business” together. Other reporters (like The New York Times’ Peter Baker) note the shift as well.
Jean-Pierre reminds me that she’s not speaking for herself at the podium. That’s as true when questions about Hunter arise as it is when she has to respond to geopolitical human rights issues that target LGBTQ+ communities. She cites Haiti’s descent into political chaos as an example of where she must hold her feelings back. It’s “one of the issues that’s toughest for me,” she says.
She knows that what she represents is part of why Biden chose her for this role. But letting her own opinions slip into the record “is not what I signed up for,” she says. “I signed up to speak on behalf of this president. That’s why he selected me.”
First lady Jill Biden can attest to that. “From our first meeting with Karine, we knew we wanted her on the team,” she says in a statement. “As a pioneering White House press secretary, she brings grace, integrity, and insight to the podium. With her calm, quiet confidence, Karine inspires us all.”
The film director Gina Prince-Bythewood, who met Jean-Pierre at an event honoring Black women across industries earlier this year, says she too is struck by Jean-Pierre’s grace: “When you’re the first, you need to do well for yourself, but you also have to do well for all those who want to come up after you. If you mess up, people judge a whole community based on your actions.”
Jean-Pierre gets at the same idea, obliquely. We’re talking about the criticism that has dogged Harris—whispers about staff turnover, a bedeviling policy portfolio. “It’s hard to be the first,” she says of her former boss. “There is always going to be criticism. You’re always going to be under a bigger microscope.”
“Men can get away with all kinds of personalities doing this job,” Fuchs tells me. “Most of them are crude and rude. Karine had to develop something different. And she did. She developed this steely personality with a big smile, and that’s her armor.”
Jean-Pierre will not do this job forever. “Someone once told me, ‘If you walk into the White House campus, and it doesn’t move you anymore, then you shouldn’t be here,’ ” she says. Perhaps she will return to cable news, having already served as a commentator on MSNBC and NBC. For now, the West Wing still sparkles. Jean-Pierre stays.
Last year, Jean-Pierre took her mother to a state dinner. “When my mom met President Biden, she cried,” Jean-Pierre says. “She cried, and he opened up his arms, and she put her head on his chest.”
Later, she called her daughter—the girl who never became a doctor, who embarked on a life of her own choosing, expectations be damned. Jean-Pierre smiles at the memory: “She said to me, ‘That was the happiest day of my life.’ ”
In this story: hair, Dior Sovoa; makeup, Kym Lee.
Listen to White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on this episode of The Run-Through here.