Karine Jean-Pierre writes she couldn’t ‘stomach’ being a Democrat anymore after party’s treatment of Biden
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre delivers her last press briefing of the Biden Administration in Washington, D.C., on January 15, 2025.
Karine Jean-Pierre, who served as White House press secretary under Joe Biden, has sharply criticized the Democratic Party in her new memoir, revealing why she decided to walk away from it and register as an independent after years as a loyal operative.
In an excerpt from her book Independent, obtained by Newsweek, Jean-Pierre recounted the phone call in which President Biden informed his team that he was withdrawing from the presidential race.
“Biden seemed to be totally at peace with his decision, but I was stunned, my feelings a blur. I was angry and sad. I was enraged and heartbroken that this man had given more than 50 years of his life to serving the American people, and in the end he’d been treated poorly by members of his own party. It was horrible,” she wrote.
Jean-Pierre said she never believed Biden would actually step aside. From her post at the White House podium, she had long defended his physical and mental fitness — but his visible cognitive decline, she acknowledged, had ultimately cost Democrats dearly.
Still, she said, what hurt most was the sense of betrayal.
“The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career,” Jean-Pierre wrote. “Everything I’d done to make people’s lives better had been connected to it. The party was the vehicle that allowed me not just to have a front seat to history, working first on [Barack] Obama’s presidential campaign then in his administration, but also to make some history of my own as the first Black woman and openly queer person to ever be a White House press secretary. Never had I considered leaving the party until now.”
She described how she was preparing to appear on The View following Biden’s announcement when she realized she could no longer continue as before.
“Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different — how I could channel my disappointment into some kind of concrete action that would allow me to fight for what I believed in without giving blind loyalty to a party I felt no longer deserved it,” she explained.
“‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent,’” Jean-Pierre wrote. “‘I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore.’”
Jean-Pierre also accused party insiders of launching what she called a “firing squad” against Biden, forcing him off the ticket last July after weeks of internal pressure following his poor debate performance against Republican President Donald Trump.
She first revealed her decision to leave the Democratic Party in June while announcing her upcoming memoir. Before serving as press secretary, Jean-Pierre worked on multiple Democratic presidential campaigns and appeared frequently as a political analyst on MSNBC.
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