A former White House press secretary has said that she was in utter shock and dismay when then-President Joe Biden informed his team he would not be running in 2024.
In an upcoming memoir, 'Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,' Karine Jean-Pierre wrote that she felt "angry and sad" even though Biden "seemed to be totally at peace" with his choice.
"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 added.
As the first Black and openly LGBTQ+ individual to hold the position, Jean-Pierre, who served as press secretary from May 2022 to January 2025, added that Biden's treatment by his own party marked a significant turning point.
The then-sitting president's poor performance in the debate against Donald Trump prompted the Democrats to organise a "firing squad" around him, she claimed, according to The New York Post.
Jean-Pierre, a former avid Democrat who served on President Barack Obama's campaign, claimed she never gave the party a second thought until she felt her basic beliefs were no longer in line.
"The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career. 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," she wrote.
In her new book, Jean-Pierre also admits that she never imagined Biden would depart.
From her position, the former White House press secretary consistently praised Biden's physical and mental health despite the controversy surrounding his apparent cognitive impairment.
Jean-Pierre felt betrayed by the accusations the former president received from his own party, which finally compelled him to withdraw from the contest.
The former press secretary also stated that she intended to go on the liberal ABC talk show 'The View' for the first time following Biden's decision to leave.
"Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could do something different," she continued.
In June 2025, Jean-Pierre announced her plan to become independent, citing a wish to be "clear-eyed and questioning, rather than blindly loyal and obedient as we may have been in the past," according to Reuters.
The 51-year-old announced her book and subsequently declared she was leaving the Democratic Party. She was an MSNBC political commentator and worked on several Democratic presidential campaigns before her prominent position in the White House.
