Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre may have titled her new book Independent, but she is not declaring her independence from former President Joe Biden just yet.
It’s a stance that not only seems at odds with the message written on the jacket cover — the subtitle is “A Look Inside A Broken White House, Outside Party Lines” — but is earning her pushback during her book tour.
A major part of Jean-Pierre’s thesis is that the Democratic Party failed Biden by abandoning him and pushing him off the ticket after a bad debate performance.
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Even people sympathetic to Biden and relentlessly critical of President Donald Trump are having trouble buying it.
“It was very personal for those of us who watched it, too, because it was a shock to our system to see that. Because — I mean, you’re talking to a guy who helped raise $25 million for Joe Biden in March of that same year,” the liberal late-night host Stephen Colbert told Jean-Pierre of his experience watching the Biden-Trump debate. “And three months later, I saw a guy who I had not seen backstage at the benefit that I did. It seemed like a dramatically different person. And at 81 years old, that’s not entirely unexpected. You can imagine why people got so worried.”
Tony Dokoupil said to Jean-Pierre in an interview on CBS Mornings: “I have to say, I thought you were going to say that, try as you might to convince Joe Biden to drop out of the race — because what we were seeing is what you were seeing, and he was struggling, and couldn’t do it — I thought you were going to say you were angry at that. What you said in this book is you’re angry at the people who tried to push him out.”
Dokoupil added: “Some Americans are going to say, ‘Seriously?’”
Co-host Gayle King, who has less of a history grilling liberals than Dokoupil, was similarly incredulous.
“I want to pick up on what Tony was saying because I, too, thought that,” King said. “You said, people said, why didn’t members of his inner circle speak up about what many believe was the apparent decline of Joe Biden, and you said you’re a member of the inner circle, and you never saw the decline. After that, I wrote, ‘How?’ You even write, Karine, that you were on the plane with him going to the debate, and you didn’t see anything.”
How? Seriously? But that is the position Jean-Pierre takes in her book, along with some shots at other tomes written about the Biden White House.
“I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline,” she wrote, adding, “I never read Tapper’s book and don’t ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House.”
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Here, Jean-Pierre is referring to Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, written by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who had co-moderated the ill-fated Biden-Trump debate, and Axios reporter Alex Thompson.
It’s a different approach than former Vice President Kamala Harris took with her own book, 107 Days. Harris stops short of saying anything unkind about Biden’s mental acuity, but concedes it was “reckless” to leave the reelection decision up to the Biden family. She also gives an unflinching look at life inside the administration.
Jean-Pierre tries to settle some scores as well, calling out (but not by name) a female White House colleague who undermined her as press secretary. The female designation seems to rule out her strange dynamic with former national security official John Kirby, who frequently took over press briefings.
Jean-Pierre isn’t happy with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat many blame for Biden’s ouster. And Jean-Pierre thinks the Democratic Party failed Harris, too.
“Somehow it was unable to help a trailblazing, extremely accomplished former prosecutor who wanted to uplift everyone in our society defeat Trump, a habitual liar and convicted felon who openly embraced the politics of cruelty,” she wrote. Harris, for her part, didn’t think the Biden White House press shop — which Jean-Pierre ran — did her any favors either.
Harris has already suffered a consequence worse than a few tough weeks in the White House briefing room for her involvement in the Biden fiasco. She lost an election, and perhaps her political career, because of it.
The Harris book raises questions about its author’s plans for a second act. But Harris’s 107 Days does deliver on its promise to be an insider account of the Biden White House and the 2024 Democratic campaign, which is probably why it has sold well. Harris is still laughing, only now all the way to the bank.
Jean-Pierre told Morning Joe that the “broken White House” she refers to in her book’s subtitle is actually the Trump White House, not the one she served in, in which case it isn’t much of an insider account at all.
This basically leaves Jean-Pierre as the leader of independents for four more years of Joe Biden, which doesn’t seem like an especially potent political force.
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Colbert gently tried to explain to Jean-Pierre a problem with her argument. “I’m not questioning his heart or his policies, but it takes more than that to be the president of the United States,” he said. “And in a moment of great pressure onstage, we saw someone shock us and worry us. And nothing could assuage that worry. So I don’t think it was necessarily a betrayal of Joe Biden, as other people saying, ‘We don’t think we were shown the Joe Biden that you saw.’”
Perhaps it speaks well of Jean-Pierre, whose earnestness compared to other political communicators selling implausible narratives was often evident in her briefings, that she is sticking to her story about Biden’s fitness for office. If the SS Joseph R. Biden is sinking, at least the captain of its press shop is willing to go down with the ship.