Posted For: Rotorblade
Karine Jean-Pierre, who previously served as White House press secretary under Joe Biden, sharply criticized the Democratic Party in her new memoir, Independent, explaining her decision to walk away from the party after decades of loyalty.
In a newly released excerpt reported by Newsweek, Jean-Pierre recounted the phone call in which Joe Biden informed his White House 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 had never imagined Biden would bow out. Despite her years of publicly defending his mental and physical fitness from the White House podium, she admitted that his cognitive decline became an undeniable political liability. Still, she said the way he was pushed aside by his own party left her disillusioned.
“The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career,” she 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.”
Jean-Pierre described feeling a “cloud of unease” following Biden’s announcement and said her planned appearance on ABC’s The View led her to reflect on her future.
“Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different,” she wrote. “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 continued, “‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore.’”
Jean-Pierre accused party leaders of turning on Biden, describing their actions as a “firing squad” that forced him off the ticket last July after intense internal pressure following his poor debate performance against President Donald Trump.
Jean-Pierre publicly revealed her decision to leave the Democratic Party in June when announcing her upcoming book. Before her tenure as press secretary, she worked on several Democratic presidential campaigns and served as a political analyst for MSNBC.