In modern America, most people would agree that the job of the White House press secretary is to lie to the press. That was not always the case. Certainly, all members of a president’s administration would be partial to their boss’s side of things, but the job was created to inform, not to obfuscate.
That original purpose faded long ago. While there were problems with the chummy relations with the press that characterized the Kennedy administration, the fully adversarial relations that now prevail — even for Democratic presidents — are also unhealthy for a republic. The main qualification for the job in the 21st century is loyalty, not clarity. The press secretary’s job now is spin, which, depending on your point of view, can include everything from favorable framing to outright falsehood.
It is fitting, then, that — despite its title — Karine Jean-Pierre’s book Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, is at its heart a book about loyalty. There are other themes to be found, as well, in this slim volume. Jean-Pierre often returns to the intersectional identities of race, sex, and sexuality in a way that will instantly return the reader to those heady post-Floyd days of the early Biden administration. She also has thoughts on the nature of parties and the factions within them. There is a score-settling recounting of a power struggle with a Biden administration official whom she does not name but who is generally believed to be Anita Dunn. But the question of loyalty and to whom it is owed comes up throughout.
Jean-Pierre is loyal to Joe Biden, perhaps more loyal than she should be, and certainly more loyal than anyone else in his administration. Even Kamala Harris — to whom Jean-Pierre also writes of with a great deal of loyalty and affection — found some time to disparage the old man a bit in her own post-election memoir, 107 Days. But, as she did at the podium in 306 press briefings, Jean-Pierre writes here as Biden’s fiercest defender outside his own family.
At times, it is jarring. Unlike the portrait of a president in decline presented in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin — a book Jean-Pierre pointedly says she disagrees with and has not read — the Biden of her memory is one physically slowed a bit by age, but fully in possession of his faculties. “I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day,” she writes, “and saw no such decline.”
The instances of odd behavior that led many to believe Biden was unwell? Jean-Pierre repeats the administration line about “cheap fakes” — videos taken out of context in some unseemly way. The disastrous debate that laid bare the truth? “I will say once again that he had a cold.” Beyond the sniffles, Biden also had to deal with extensive world travel (he had been home for 11 days) and his son’s criminal trial (which he didn’t attend and which also ended 16 days earlier).
Loyalty is a virtue, but it is not for no reason that the phrase “loyal to a fault” exists. We should be loyal to our family, our friends, our employers, and others who have earned our trust. But the limits of loyalty must be tested when they begin to contradict fealty to the truth and to the self. Maybe Jean-Pierre never noticed Biden’s now well-attested mental decline. But if that is so, she must also see now that the administration officials above her sent her out each day with incomplete information and bade her lie to the people. Jean-Pierre’s sense of outrage comes through clearly as she details the gradual, continual defections from Biden that occurred over the 24 days between the debate and Biden’s withdrawal from the race. She insists that Biden “could have survived the debate setback” had the party remained loyal, but “the Democrats — Biden’s party, my party — didn’t seem to want to give him the chance.”
Despite being “technically a part of the president’s inner circle,” Jean-Pierre was blindsided by Biden’s decision to throw in the towel. She nevertheless maintained that intense loyalty and devotion to spin until the clock ran out on Biden’s term.
While she devotes plenty of space to disparaging Donald Trump and Republicans generally, the real scorn here is for establishment Democrats, whom Jean-Pierre sees as having abandoned the president. Loyalty to Biden and loyalty to herself now demand, in the author’s telling, that she abandon the political party that was neither loyal to her nor to her boss. She has, as the title suggests, become a political independent.
But it is a strange manner of independence. Independents usually are seen as undecided between the two major parties. But even if you skipped the chapter here called “The Republicans,” rest assured, Jean-Pierre does not want you to consider voting for them. “I’m not saying to vote third party. I’m not saying to vote Republican. I am saying let’s figure out new ways to be acknowledged.”
KARINE JEAN-PIERRE STICKS TO HER BIDEN STORY, BUT NO ONE IS BUYING IT
This message is especially directed at black women, who have been the Democratic Party’s most loyal members in recent years and whom Jean-Pierre believes have been uniquely betrayed and taken for granted. But in giving away immediately the idea that they should, in the end, never vote for anyone but Democrats, she fatally undercuts the argument. Unless they are willing to walk away, the party will never change.
If conservatives want to extend any kind of grace and understanding to a former political opponent, it should be to recognize that Jean-Pierre truly believed in Joe Biden and was loyal to him. But this narrative should also remind us of the times when loyalty goes too far and asks too much. Loyalty must not require blindness. It must also mean calling those to whom we are loyal to account and telling them the truth, no matter how painful. Jean-Pierre understands that when it comes to the Democratic Party. But for Biden, she’s still spinning.
Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.