There was a shift away from the comical banter between White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Fox "News" reporter Peter Doocy yesterday, after he asked, "Why did President Biden suggest that Kyle Rittenhouse, on trial in Kenosha, is a white supremacist?"
He was probably referring to the time in 2020 when then presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted a video that showed Rittenhouse with an AR-15 rifle and said, referring to Trump, "There's no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night."
Gone was Psaki's amused smile. Gone was her mysterious smirk. And gone was her signature, snappy one-liner that put the term "Psaki bomb" on the trending Twitter hashtag list.
Instead, Psaki responded with an audible, serious sigh.
She then explained — not in her famously entertaining grade-school teacher mode, but instead in a more somber, tuckered out tone — that she wouldn't get into anything about the ongoing Rittenhouse trial. "What I can reiterate for you is the president's view that we shouldn't have — broadly speaking — vigilantes patrolling our communities with assault weapons. We shouldn't have opportunists corrupting peaceful protests by rioting and burning down the communities they claim to represent, anywhere in the country."
She does, per usual, deliver a spot-on answer. But missing was all the entertaining garnishes that usually top off a Doocy-Psaki exchange.
I hope it was just a sore subject, but the Jen-and-Peter Show may have run its course.
