Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is on a promotional tour for her new book, “Independent,” in which she argues that the Democratic Party “betray[ed]” former President Joe Biden by pressuring him to drop his reelection bid in 2024, an event that inspired her to leave the party. “Being independent will allow me to speak more freely, to stay true to my core beliefs,” Jean-Pierre writes.
Her tour is going poorly. In interview after interview, Jean-Pierre perpetually comes across as caught off-guard, unclear of what her core beliefs are and unpersuasive — and she’s taking a bruising on social media for it. This isn’t because she’s bad at speaking; Jean-Pierre has years of experience sparring with reporters as a press operative and campaign adviser. Rather, it’s because there is an incoherence to her politico-intellectual project: Her departure from the Democratic Party is not driven by a substantive repudiation of the party’s policy vision; it is, paradoxically, driven by anger about people being insufficiently loyal to the party’s incumbent president.
Jean-Pierre’s constant description of the party’s campaign to pressure Biden to drop out of the race as a “betrayal” in her book and interviews is an important tell. It implies that influential party figures committed a moral error by concluding that Biden was not fit to compete against Trump. In an interview with PBS, Jean-Pierre described the pressure campaign against Biden as a wicked act against an innocent victim. “Joe Biden objectively had a successful presidential [sic]. Joe Biden objectively was a good human who cared about the American people. That’s what people would say,” she said. “And yet he was treated as if he was the worst thing ever.”
That is, of course, an absurd straw man. Biden was not treated as if he was “the worst thing ever.” He was characterized as unfit to win against Trump. This was not because someone dug up some secret dirt on Biden, but because of his disastrous debate performance in which he sounded nonsensical in some of his comments, leaving even sympathetic pundits slack-jawed. Furthermore, Biden was not some kind of saint — most obviously because he was a supporter of genocide in Gaza — but even if he was, he would not be entitled to a second term. Nor should the party have prioritized his feelings over holding the White House.
Notably, PBS asked Jean-Pierre several times if she believed Biden could have survived the debate if he had stayed in the race, and every time she declined to answer the question directly. A similar dynamic played out in another interview — this one conducted by The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner — during which Jean-Pierre constantly avoided substantively defending her view other than saying “nobody knows what would’ve happened” had Biden stayed in. That’s true, but we do know that Biden’s poll numbers were atrocious, that Harris significantly outperformed Biden in the polls and that the Democrats saw a gigantic surge in campaign donations after he dropped out.
Despite her conviction that Biden should have stayed in — or at least not have been questioned — Jean-Pierre also appeared uncomfortable answering a question from Chotiner about his ability to serve as president through 2029. “It’s not my place to say,” she responded at first, puzzlingly. Only when asked for clarity did she add, “I did not see anything that would cause me concern.” When Chotiner followed up by asking about Biden’s debate performance, she said, “I had never seen him like that before.” But when Chotiner gave another example of Biden being incoherent in a media interview, and said he was surprised Jean-Pierre didn’t see what many others saw, she replied with a non-answer: “I’m not the only person who feels this. I’m just the one speaking very loudly.”
If anything, Jean-Pierre’s experience as a press secretary works against her, leading her to reflexively deflect anytime a question forces potential accountability. Perhaps she’s concerned that if she admits that Biden frequently seemed out of sorts — and there were many examples — it will be seen as evidence that she might have been concealing something from the public after all.
But the roots of her behavior run deeper than that. Jean-Pierre’s constant dodges are a proxy for her ideological position — that it was inherently good to be loyal to Biden, and that it’s a sin to question the party leader or chain of command. This also comes through in her objections to the brief debate within the party over whether former Vice President Kamala Harris was the right person to replace Biden as an “insult” and a sign of “disrespect” — even though in her book she also said she thought she “never really believed Harris could win.”
Jean-Pierre is laying bare the self-sabotaging and antidemocratic nature of calling for party unity at all costs. This is not something unique to Democrats — any political organization or movement must wrestle with the trade-offs of sticking together or splitting on an issue or a leader. But compulsive fealty and groupthink are stultifying, and the Democratic establishment has long invoked the specter of Republican extremism as a means to discourage the kind of internal debate that the party desperately needs in the Trump era.
Jean-Pierre appears not only hostile to the idea of strategic debate within a party, but also immune to questioning the moral costs of unceasing loyalty. When my colleague Ayman Mohyeldin asked Jean-Pierre over the weekend, with regard to Biden’s abominable Israel policy, “Do you regret any of the positions that you advocated for on behalf of the administration?” Jean-Pierre dodged the question, then dodged the follow-up. When he asked yet another time if she had any regrets about her job, after a lengthy preamble she eventually said, “we did not get everything right” but “I was very proud of everything that I did. I don’t take anything back.” In her refusal to get specific, she effectively said no.
It’s unclear what the point of Jean-Pierre’s going independent is if she refuses to articulate clear arguments, engage in substantive policy critiques or demonstrate introspection. Instead, she seems to implicitly be making a case for unwavering deference to leadership within the party. Yet it is precisely the head-in-the-sand loyalty to Bid en for so long that helped doom the Democratic Party in 2024. Jean-Pierre’s floundering discredits not just herself but also anyone who demands blind fealty to the Democratic Party — or any political organization, for that matter. As Jean-Pierre so ably (though unintentionally) shows, refusal to admit defeat is not fidelity, but folly.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
