Why Biden's White House Press Secretary Is Leaving the Democratic Party

[Shrek]

The New Yorker

In a new book, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” the former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre describes what she considers a betrayal of Joe Biden by the Democratic Party. “I watched Democratic leadership abandon, and in the end betray, a man who’d led our country through a pandemic and a time of historic political turmoil,” she writes. Indeed, Jean-Pierre is so outraged by the often unnamed Democratic establishmentarians who maneuvered to push Biden to step aside as the Presidential nominee, during the summer of 2024, in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, that she has decided to leave the Democratic Party and become a political Independent. (Jean-Pierre, who served for more than two years in her role, which consisted of defending the Administration to the press and explaining its policies, also blames the Democratic Party because it “couldn’t articulate the achievements of the Biden/Harris administration well enough.”) Before her time in the White House, Jean-Pierre worked for Kamala Harris’s 2020 Vice-Presidential campaign; she was the first openly gay and first Black White House press secretary.

I recently spoke by phone with Jean-Pierre. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why she believes Biden should have stayed on as the candidate in 2024, her surprising feelings about Kamala Harris, and whether Biden was getting accurate information about the state of his campaign against Trump.