‘Opposition party’: Karine Jean-Pierre, press secretary under Biden, on why she left the Democratic Party

Yes, I totally agree it was. It definitely was a party that I believed in, and still am aligned with, but I do not like the direction of the party currently, right now; because I feel as if they are not fighting. I feel as if there’s no strategy. I feel as if we are headed to a direction where our democracy could be no more if we are not very, very careful.

I learned, during my time, in order to have democracy, you have to work at it every day, and I don’t see that from the leadership. And I do also feel the groups who really make up the party, some of us are being thrown under the bus.

We knew the Trump administration was coming in November of last year, and there was no plan. There was no focus. There was no ‘OK, no. This should not be business as usual. So what are we going to do?’

And that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, as to what is the direction next? How do we meet this moment? And a road map to get engaged and to encourage people to get involved.

I have known President Biden since 2009, when he was vice president for Barack Obama, and he has always been someone that I have known to be decent, to be a good human, to care about people and to work very hard, certainly when he was president, to deliver for the American people. And he did that.

Objectively, he had a pretty successful couple of years in the administration with the economy, trying to turn that around, dealing with issues that really matter to the American people. And so when you come to this debate, it was a bad debate. It was a shocking debate. Not going to take that away. We saw what we saw.

I was still surprised in the way the Democratic Party coordinated a campaign, an ugly campaign, to take him out of the race after 50-plus years of public service.

One thing that I try to tell people is to understand I was in it personally. So I saw what was happening. I saw the campaign develop. I saw the nastiness that was kind of infused into him making his decision.

And for me, it was something that I had never seen before, and it was quite shocking.

That’s not my experience, and I talk about it in the book. Look, I got to see him every single day. I am not saying he did not age. He aged. He showed age. He talked slower, he walked slower. His voice was softer. I mean, there are things that we saw that looked like age.

But I’m talking about his mental acuity. If he was there, he was there every single day. He pushed us. He was on top of policy. Anytime he called me or called me into the Oval Office, I knew that I had to be ready for whatever he was going to present or ask me. Let’s not forget, this is somebody who also led a coalition when it came to the war in Ukraine that, globally, we hadn’t seen in decades. People saw him actively, almost every day, doing the work. And so that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I saw, and I could only speak for myself.

I just think the timing of it — it was so close. There was so much on this 2024 race. And the time to have done that, if they were thinking about his age, to me, should have been in 2023 after the midterms, when the primary was going to start.

That’s when a conversation should have happened, and it didn’t. If anything, they encouraged him to run. They encouraged him to do a reelection. I also think that behavior from the Democratic leadership, I actually think hurt us as well. Because, you remember, there was a primary where 14 million voters came out during the primary to vote for both Biden and Kamala Harris.

You have to think those voters — some of those voters probably were supporters of his — and thought to themselves, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on with the party?’

To me, the timing of it, what was the reality, not just of that debate, but everything. You’ve got to consider, everything — who he was, what he did, how he actually was able to deliver for the American people. And again, I’m speaking for myself.

On average, I saw him every day, and that debate was not the norm.

I’m glad you said that, because there is something broken with the system. When you have millions of independent voters who say they don’t see themselves in the Democratic Party. They don’t see themselves in the Republican Party. But then, if there’s a primary, most primaries are closed, and so they can’t even have a voice.

That means the system is broken. And I’m not calling for a third party. I’m calling for a system that works and that feels like it is centered around people, not party.

My whole point of this is, please get involved. Please figure out a way to have a voice. Please figure out how you can help the communities that you care about. It is important how you engage in this moment. It is critical that we get people to engage.

And I also believe, if the leadership were to come together, that there’s a way to reimagine how we move forward, how we move in this future, and as we’re looking at this country. That is the way that I think about things. We have to stay engaged. We do. We have to stay engaged.

You said the Democrats don’t have the House, they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. It is true. So in my mind, they should be like an opposition party.

This is the time that you do everything that you can to communicate and to have a unifying message, not a broken up message — a unifying message, so that it really connects with the American people. And this is the reimagining.

I’m glad that they are sticking hard on the shutdown. And don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of people are suffering from the shutdown. I know a lot of federal government workers who are wondering how they’re going to put food on their table.

The problem with where we are today is, if the Democrats don’t stand up, we are going to head to a health care crisis. What they have to do now is make sure that they message this, that the American people know what they’re trying to do and why they’re trying to do it. So to me, it’s a messaging. It’s an opposition. What does that look like? How do they really have a plan and a strategy to move forward in that?