Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has revealed her reason for leaving the Democratic Party after years of loyalty, citing disappointment in how then-President Joe Biden was forced off the presidential ticket in July 2024.
According to her account, Biden appeared "totally at peace" with having to quit the race. But Jean-Pierre wrote that she was overwhelmed with anger and sadness.
"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."
Jean-Pierre was one of the White House's most outspoken defenders of Biden's mental and physical fitness. She consistently rejected claims that he was unfit for office, going on record as early as June 2022 to dismiss such reports as "hearsay" when then–CNN anchor Don Lemon asked whether Biden had the "stamina" to finish a second term.
After Biden's performance in the June 2024 debate against then-presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump, which was widely criticized and deepened public skepticism about his ability to continue doing the job, she again defended Biden's fitness for office, saying that the then-81-year-old president was "as sharp as ever."
Biden's withdrawal the next month cleared the path for Vice President Kamala Harris to secure the Democratic Party's nomination without a primary contest. Harris, who tried to distance herself from Biden and his policies during the campaign, went on to lose to Trump in a landslide in November 2024.
Jean-Pierre, who had stood by Biden throughout his presidency and reelection campaign, said she was left to question the political loyalty that had shaped her entire career.
"The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career," she 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 [President 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 recounted how she began to think seriously about leaving the party altogether, writing that she asked herself: "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 quit the Democratic Party was first revealed by her publisher in June, a month after the release of "Original Sin," a book coauthored by CNN's Jake Tapper—who moderated the June 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Trump—and Axios's Alex Thompson.
In that book, the two journalists detailed how White House staffers and Democratic allies expressed growing concern about Biden's mental acuity during the final months of his presidency, citing instances when he struggled to recognize longtime political allies, lost his train of thought in key conversations, and forgot important dates.
Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, dismissed the allegations contained in the book in a recent interview on ABC's "The View," emphasizing her husband's busy daily schedule while in the White House.
"The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn't see how hard Joe worked every single day," she said. "He'd get up, he'd put in a full day, and then at night—I'd be in bed reading my book—and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. It was nonstop."