Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has decided she’s no longer a Democrat, pointing to the party’s “betrayal” of President Joe Biden for her rationale.
Instead, Jean-Pierre will become a registered independent, she revealed Wednesday.
The news came by way of the announcement of Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, which is set to be published October 21.
“Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly, she has served two American presidents, Obama and Biden,” her publisher, Legacy Lit, wrote in a press blurb for the book. “In 2020, she joined Biden’s campaign as a senior adviser, becoming Harris’s chief of staff and then, two years later, White House press secretary.
“She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision,” the publisher continued.
Independent promises to spill tea on the internal party drama that led to Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential nomination, as told by the Biden official most frequently positioned to defend his health and ongoing candidacy.
Swapping party affiliation is definitely an unorthodox way to market one’s upcoming book, but considering the wide range of texts focusing on Biden’s final hour that are already competing for bookstore shelf space, perhaps an unconventional approach is needed. Jean-Pierre’s will be one of many analyses of Biden’s tenure in the White House, with a particular focus on the historic end of his bid for reelection.
Last month, Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper released Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the culmination of interviews with more than 200 individuals attached to the Biden White House. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, co-authored by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, was published April 1.
Chris Whipple, who examined Biden’s 2020 win, wrote a slim investigation called Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History. Another book, 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America, is the result of more than 300 interviews conducted over an 18-month period. It’s co-written by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, and is expected out July 3.
And Biden himself has promised to pen his own account, with plans to publish a book next year, according to sources that spoke with The Guardian.
But the decision to exit the Democratic Party comes at a particularly awkward time for Jeane-Pierre, who was the first Black and openly LGBTQ individual to serve as White House press secretary. She will be pulling her support from the only major LGBTQ-friendly party at a time when the Trump administration continues to attack and rescind gay and transgender rights, and weeks before she is scheduled to act as one of the grand marshalls of the New York City Pride march, alongside TV personality Michelle Visage, transgender activists Miss Major and Raquel Willis, and GLAAD executive DaShawn Usher.
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