White House press secretary Jen Psaki revealed in an interview published Thursday that she has discussed plans to step down from her role fielding reporter questions on a near-daily basis in about a year.
“I think it’s going to be time for somebody else to have this job, in a year from now or about a year from now,” she told CNN’s David Axelrod — a former colleague from the Obama White House — during a podcast interview.
Psaki said that “it will be hard,” but she had discussed a roughly one-year term with the Biden transition team and doesn’t want to miss moments raising her two kids.
She had initially joined the Biden transition team after previously serving as a spokesperson for the State Department when John Kerry was secretary of state and later as President Barack Obama’s communications director.
In December, Psaki said during an NPR interview previewing her tenure that she envisioned an effort “to rebuild trust with the American people” as among her duties as press secretary in the wake of the Trump administration.
She elaborated on that point in the CNN interview Thursday, likening her job as part of a recovery effort “from the ‘Game of Thrones’ period of our history.”
“Some of what I think the job is in this moment — and this won’t always be and certainly hasn’t been historically — is kind of reaffirming and restating like what the role of government is, right? And what the role of agencies are and what the role of policy processes are and how a bill becomes a law,” she said.
She’s been great—will miss her when she leaves.
It will be a real loss when she leaves. Replacing her will be hard. I’m sure they will find someone good.
Hopefully they have someone better in mind but I doubt that’s possible.
She’ll inevitably increase her earnings tenfold with her own show on MSNBC or CNN. Mark it.
Yes. It turns out that “regular order” is more than bureaucracy, it is one of the guardrails of democracy which is why incipient tyrants like Trump abused and circumvented it. The trick is not just to reaffirm it as Ms Psaki rightly does, but strengthen and enforce it and for that it is clear at the moment that we need a Democratic congress and executive.*
ETA: and probably a less reactionary SCOTUS