Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
Get our free Inside Washington email
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has said her new book aimed to provide a “road map” to moving away from the two-party system.
Speaking on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the former political adviser who worked under President Joe Biden said the two-party system “is not working”. Jean-Pierre went on to accuse the Democrats of having no “teeth” or “fight.”
“When I left the administration this year I was just minding my business, going to the supermarket, going to pick up my kid, going to the coffee shop, and people would come up to me in tears and say ‘What’s happening? Why is the Democratic leadership not fighting? We need more, how are we going to get out of this?” she said.
“And I talk about that in the book and that’s what created for me an opportunity, as a private citizen now, to say okay, how do we focus on where we are today, how do we move forward, and what’s a road map that people can follow to get engaged?
“I think it’s really important to get involved and get engaged and that’s what this book is about.”
Karine Jean Pierre discussing her new book on Stephen Colbert’s show Monday night (The Late Show with Stephen Colbet)
In Jean-Pierre’s new book Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines, the former senior political adviser opens up on her decision to leave the Democratic Party after Trump took office in January this year.
She wrote about how she was left questioning how she could channel her disappointment into “concrete action” after Biden announced he would be dropping out of the presidential race, and was later replaced by Kamala Harris.
“The Democratic Party had defined my life, my career,” Jean-Pierre wrote.
“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, working first on [Barack] Obama’s presidential campaign then in his administration, but also to make some history of my own as the first Black woman and openly queer person to ever be a White House press secretary. Never had I considered leaving the party until now.”
She wrote that she began to consider becoming an independent after witnessing the Democratic Party unleashing a “firing squad” on Biden after a disastrous TV debate against Donald Trump.
“Now the cloud of unease hovering over me solidified into an idea about how I could possibly do something different. How I could channel my disappointment into some kind of concrete action that would allow me to fight for what I believed in without giving blind loyalty to a party I felt no longer deserved it,” she continued.
“‘You know what? I’m going to become an independent. I don’t think I can stomach being in the Democratic Party anymore.’”
She revealed she was leaving the Democratic Party in June while promoting her book, which was released on October 21.
