Former Biden White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had always been a Democrat. But when she saw how the party treated former President Joe Biden, she realized it was time for a change.
Jean-Pierre has detailed her decision to become an independent in her new book, “Independent.”
In her book, Jean-Pierre wrote of the phone call when Biden told the White House team that he was dropping out of the presidential race, Newsweek reported.
She said her feelings varied from Biden’s.
“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, who said she didn’t think Biden would drop out, defended Biden’s physical and mental viability.
Eventually, his cognitive decline cost the Democrats, Fox News reported.
Jean-Pierre believed, however, the party betrayed Biden.
“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.”
She wrote about how she planned to go on “The View,” the liberal ABC talk show, after Biden’s announcement.
“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 then realized she wanted to become an independent.
“‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore,’” she wrote.
Jean-Pierre said Democrats unleashed a “firing squad” on Biden, who left the race last July following pressure from Democrats after his disasterous debate against Donald Trump.
