Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest apologists, announced she’s leaving the party she served so loyally.
According to Jean-Pierre, she’s walking away due to the party’s “horrible” treatment of her former boss, President Joe Biden.
In her new book, “Independent,” Jean-Pierre unloaded on the Democratic Party, detailing the exact moment she decided to become an independent after years of being a loyal Democrat.
In an excerpt from her much-anticipated book obtained by Newsweek, Jean-Pierre detailed the phone call in which Biden told the White House team that he was dropping out of the 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,” Jean-Pierre wrote.
Jean-Pierre first reported that she was leaving the party in the summer, but this is the first time she’s detailing the exact reasoning behind the sudden departure.
Jean-Pierre revealed that she never thought Biden would drop out.
In fact, while serving as press secretary, Jean-Pierre repeatedly touted Biden’s physical and mental viability while speaking to the press.
But it was Biden’s cognitive decline that wound up costing the Democratic Party badly during the 2024 presidential election.
However, Jean-Pierre still believed the treatment of Biden was enough to leave the party for good.
“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.”
Jean-Pierre also detailed how she was at peace with her decision, even noting that she felt more free.
Jean-Pierre, 50, succeeded Jen Psaki as press secretary in 2022 after previously serving as deputy press secretary and also working as a senior adviser during Biden’s victorious 2020 campaign.
During President Barack Obama’s first term, she was a regional political director.
Jean-Pierre said her months since leaving the White House had involved “self-care, sleep, hanging out with my family, hanging out with my friends.”
“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 wrote.
Pierre wrote, “‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore.’”