Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has revealed the deep disappointment that drove her to leave the Democratic Party, citing how then-President Joe Biden was “treated poorly by members of his own party” when he was forced off the 2024 presidential ticket.
In an excerpt from her new memoir, Independent, published by Newsweek on October 16, Jean-Pierre recounts the pivotal moment in July 2024 when Biden told his senior staff via Zoom he would exit the race, a decision she said she “never thought” he would make.
Despite Biden appearing “totally at peace” with stepping down, Jean-Pierre wrote that the news left her “enraged and heartbroken.”
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“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,” she wrote. “It was horrible.”
The withdrawal, which cleared the path for then-Vice President Kamala Harris to secure the Democratic nomination, came after persistent public skepticism about Biden’s age and fitness for office, which deepened following his June 2024 debate performance against President Donald Trump.
Jean-Pierre had been one of the White House’s most steadfast defenders of Biden’s mental and physical acuity. She consistently dismissed reports of his alleged decline, including going on record in June 2022 to dismiss them as “hearsay” and stating in February 2024—after a special counsel report characterized him as an “elderly man with a poor memory”—that the assessment “does not live in reality.” Even after the widely criticized June debate, she defended the then-81-year-old president, saying he was “as sharp as ever.”
After standing by Biden throughout his presidency and re-election campaign, Jean-Pierre was left to question the political loyalty that had defined her entire career.
“The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career,” she wrote, noting it was the vehicle that allowed her to make history as the first Black woman and openly queer person to be White House press secretary. “Never had I considered leaving the party until now.”
She channeled her frustration into a decision to break with the party, writing, “How could I 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… 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’s decision to become an independent was first revealed by her publisher in June, a month after the release of Original Sin by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson. That book detailed growing concerns among White House staffers and Democratic allies about Biden’s mental acuity during his final months in office. However, Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, has dismissed such allegations, emphasizing her husband’s intense work ethic during his time in the White House.
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