Karine Jean-Pierre Writes History's Most Incoherent Memoir

Joe Biden's famously obtuse former chief spokesperson has a lot to say about last year's election season, but none of it makes any sense. Wow, is this book bizarre!

Independent, the new tell-nothing tell-all by former Joe Biden spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, is framed in the introduction as the patriotic diatribe of a once-loyal Democrat who’s now “free to speak for myself” and “eager to say what I think,” thanks to a dramatic decision:

After being a party insider for twenty years, I now believe I can fight harder for my country from outside the Democratic Party than from within it. From here on, I am politically an independent.

Just a few pages later, however, Jean-Pierre claims she only noticed something wrong with Biden once, during his infamous debate performance last June 27th. “Whoa.. He must be sick,” she deadpans, then reframes Independent as an answer to a book she hasn’t even read:

CNN anchor Jake Tapper kicked off the debate. He later wrote a supposed tell-all about Biden, Original Sin… accusing [Biden] of a cover-up of his mental decline and how his aides quashed concerns. I was technically a part of the president’s inner circle and saw Biden every day and saw no such decline. 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.

It’s all entertaining stuff (the “technically” is hilarious). Jean-Pierre announces she’s finally free to tell the truth, but begins by declaring that Tapper’s Original Sin — another book marketed as “the full, unsettling truth… told for the first time” — was wrong not because Tapper was lying about how long it took for him to notice Biden’s problems, but because Biden never had any problems to notice.

Jean-Pierre is generating significant negative Internet wattage this week, battered everywhere for insisting she never saw anything concerning in Biden’s private behavior. In a wild exchange with Gayle King of CBS, she doubled down on a book passage claiming she didn’t even see an issue with Biden before the critical debate, even though she traveled to it with him on Air Force One (“Maybe I was too nervous… to notice whether or not he was sniffling?”). Apparently, that trip was a rare instance in which Jean-Pierre not only didn’t talk to Biden on the plane, but didn’t have conversations with anyone who did. “I had no clue Biden had a cold and was off his game,” she wrote, “until he began to speak at the debate.”

Independent reads like an oxygen-deprived sequel to Tapper’s book. The humorous premise of Original Sin involved Tapper’s sources insisting Biden “stole an election” because if he’d stepped aside earlier, the party might have had a “robust primary” — exactly the scenario they spent years fighting to avoid, savaging Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and smearing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. into the arms of Trump. The CNN man insisted “insiders” who had a “better window into Biden’s condition than the general public” saw things that “shocked them” before last June’s debate, when the truth finally became obvious even to media. But according to Tapper, the problem wasn’t that insiders lied, but were lied to. His first chapter was titled “He totally fucked us,” a quote about Biden by Kamala Harris aide David Plouffe.

Never mind that the world could see Biden was in drool-cup mode as far back back as 2019, or that Special Counsel Robert Hur made it legal record that Biden likely couldn’t be convicted because a jury would see him as incompetent, an “elderly man with a poor memory.” No, the problem was, “Biden fucked us.”

That was funny as hell, but Jean-Pierre just one-upped Tapper by insisting nothing was wrong with Biden and that — get this — the real problem was that the press undermined the president, and not after the debate, but all along! “Pretty much since the day he’d stepped into the White House,” Jean-Pierre wrote, “the press had taken every opportunity to imply Biden was too old or mentally unfit for the job.” She is referring to the same press corps that insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack” for four and a half years, while he was serially sternum-poking voters, staring into space, walking off set in the middle of interviews, and turning every public ceremony into a potential Chevy Chase routine:

Still, the idea that nothing was physically wrong with Biden was merely the introductory absurdity of Independent. Scenes like the bit with Gayle King will get the viral energy, but the book purported to have a larger purpose, and that is where the real hilarity lay. Jean-Pierre in her “Declaration of Independence” introduction announced herself free to level criticisms at the Democratic Party that “defined my life.”

What criticisms, you ask? I made a mental top-ten list of guesses during the introduction, and the only one I got right was, “Will say some shit about Nancy Pelosi.” The rest? It’s like one of Kevin Spacey’s diaries from Seven, only the author is on the loose and getting green-room invites:

Take the titular premise that Jean-Pierre is now an “independent.” In Chapter 3 Jean-Pierre argues, seemingly sincerely, that the two-party system in America is flawed compared to the “range of parties” offered in European parliamentary democracies, where a person can identify as anything from a Communist to a “far-right Rassemblement National.” In America, the closest thing to such diversity is the ability to register as an Independent, which she hails:

While some of those alliances may garner only a few seats in the legislative body, the fact that they are viable parties offers an option to a vast range of voters, whether they are socialists or citizens with protectionist, even xenophobic views. Given that the United States lacks such variety, registering as an independent may offer many the purest, most authentic political fit.

A few pages later, Jean-Pierre says that as much as “I completely get” the frustration with entrenched parties, she’s not looking to add new options, and is only choosing Independent status as a way to more effectively influence/aid Democrats.

Being an independent does not necessarily mean you need or want to vote for a third party... In fact, I want to encourage people not to. While I completely get the frustration many have with both the Democrats and the GOP… in my lifetime I’ve watched third parties hand the White House to Republicans twice… We have to be realistic about the fact that choosing a third-party candidate who has little to no possibility of garnering enough popular or electoral votes to win the office can result in a more dangerous dominant party claiming victory.

Near the top of the list of “mistakes” Jean-Pierre says the Democrats made was that “The Democratic Party, my party, didn’t know how to win.” She pointed a finger at Pelosi and other senior Dems who failed to “summon enough know-how to help an intelligent, accomplished attorney” in Kamala Harris “defeat an ignorant former reality TV star.” In choosing her, Biden had “showed how loyal and strategic” he was, “passing the baton to mend his broken party while making sure Harris got the opportunity that was rightfully hers.”

Jean-Pierre then complained on more than one occasion that Pelosi and others had gone so far as to privately express doubt that Harris should be the candidate, even suggesting — horror of horrors — that voters participate in the process:

Nancy Pelosi never went on television and said, “We don’t want Kamala.” But the congressperson who first told me Pelosi believed Biden had to go also said Pelosi was explicit in declaring she didn’t want Harris to replace him. Many party insiders speculated that Pelosi preferred Newsom, California’s charismatic governor and her fellow San Franciscan… Instead, an anonymous strategist here, an unnamed insider there would periodically pipe up in the press and say that with so much talent in the wings, the party should throw the convention gates open and let the voters decide.

A few pages later, Jean-Pierre described her feelings after Trump won re-election, saying she wasn’t surprised at all, because America was too racist and sexist to elect Kamala Harris:

Finally, about 1 a.m., I tumbled into bed. When I woke up, it was over. Harris had lost. I received calls from friends who were distraught or numb with disbelief. But I wasn’t surprised by the outcome. The truth was, I never really believed Harris could win. I’d been in the body of a Black woman all my life. I’d stood at the podium in the White House briefing room, traveled in my chocolate skin through rural towns, and all my experiences of blistering stares and racist assumptions left me unable to see this country electing a president who looked like me.

Recapping: Jean-Pierre is leaving the Democratic Party because it “didn’t know how to win,” proof of which being its relentless efforts at “softening the ground beneath Harris’s feet” by saying in private that Kamala Harris “shouldn’t be a shoo-in” to take Biden’s place in the ticket. In passage after caterwauling passage Jean-Pierre rips the leadership for failing to show true belief in Harris as a candidate, only to cap off all these arguments by saying she herself never thought Harris could win!

Trying to work through this logic is tough, like untangling a monkey’s fist with mittens on. If Jean-Pierre never believed Harris could win (much like Biden, whom I strongly suspect felt the same way, announcing Kamala as a final fuck-you to the party), what exactly is she saying, given that one of her complaints is the Democrats “don’t know how to win”?

She also left out the inconvenient history that Biden and his family were far from sold on Kamala as a running mate in 2020, especially after she Molotov-bombed him as a probusing racist in a primary debate. It was the very Democratic leadership Jean-Pierre rips in this book that forced Biden’s hand in his choice of VP — all four of the finalists he was given to choose from were women, two black, reportedly from a larger pool of a dozen women. But the major theme of the book turns out to be that the Democratic Party betrayed women in general and black women specifically.

“Democratic leadership also failed us, first when it disregarded Black women’s voices by shoving Biden aside, and then when it hesitated initially to fully support Harris,” Jean-Pierre wrote. Odd, but this was the killer passage:

Black women are tired of being used, overlooked, and taken for granted… That we will take on the extra tasks at work without pay, assume the lion’s share of labor in our communities without fanfare, and do it all without complaint. Indeed, we are leaders in our cities and households, matriarchs who fight for rights and policies that benefit the whole of society… In 2024, the nation could have finally begun to repay what it owes us and benefited itself by giving the top leadership role to Harris, who could bring the talents embodied by so many Black women to the nation’s highest office — as exemplified by her having to step into the breach with less than four months to campaign, doing so tirelessly and with grace. We’d given our all, put forth our best, and we were rejected in favor of a man who represents all the nation’s worst qualities…

Jean-Pierre mentions a half-dozen times that she’s the “first black and openly queer White House press secretary.” It sounds like an accomplishment the first time she says it and a complaint by the end, since her gripe is that Democrats decided mid-race to adopt the defeatist attitude that something was wrong with Joe Biden, instead of continuing to insist, as Jean-Pierre did, that he was “thoughtful, clearheaded, and well-informed.”

As a result, the party merely put Kamala Harris on the precipice of the presidency, without actually securing the office for her. For Jean-Pierre, who again was also upset that the press didn’t do more to ignore Biden’s health issues during the first three and a half years of his term, this was a bridge too far. If “You couldn’t just give us the presidency?” isn’t the lead exhibit in the “I’m so tired” wing of a future Woke History Museum, there’s no justice.

The core complaint in Independent is that apart from a “brief reprieve” in 2020, when the summer of Floyd saw “literature such as White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo gaining in popularity,” America has shown itself to be simply too backward to recognize the essential superiority of candidates like Harris. Even so, Jean-Pierre insists, Democrats could have done more to help. “When critics said Harris didn’t know anything about foreign policy,” she wrote, “Democrats should have emphasized how she’d worked closely with our partners in Asia as well as African nations like Ghana, Zambia, and Tanzania.”

Democrats could have spent $100 billion a second on ads emphasizing Kamala’s cooperation with Zambia and Tanzania, and they wouldn’t have been able to compete with videos like the one below:

Jean-Pierre’s thesis is also just wrong. Trump was far from a juggernaut. He left office in 2021 with a 62% disapproval rating and trailed Captain Dodderpants for virtually all of 2022 and 2023. If Harris had been a good or even a middling candidate, she easily could have won. However, she was handcuffed both by her own peculiarities and the huge Gobstopper-sized zit in the middle of the Democratic Party’s forehead, which grew out of years of denials that the chief executive was a vegetable. Videos featuring Jean-Pierre figured heavily in the growth of that Gobstopper.

She raged at reporters, not even conservatives, for asking rational questions. The scene below took place in July last year, in the wake of a post-debate New York Times report that Biden saw a neurologist. Jean-Pierre had been caught not telling the truth about this, and when correspondents like AP’s Zeke Miller and Ed O’Keefe of CBS pushed her, she flipped out. Her evasions were comical, implying Presidents might have casual contact with a physician more easily than a layperson because the doctor is just down the hall as opposed to a “public transportation” ride away, while acting like reporters were being unreasonable in not accepting that a “verbal check-in” with a neurologist specializing in Parkinson’s Disease is different from a “medical exam.” Watch how calm and accommodating Miller in particular is (he’s the first reporter in the video), yet Jean-Pierre eventually rips even him for “not okay” questioning:

Jean-Pierre had over a year to think about what to say about all this, and instead of writing the book the whole world wanted, the true story (complete with photos of Biden’s used-bib collection and pictorial toilet guides) of her frustration at having to be the public face of one of the most obvious and legally perilous cons in American political history, she denied there was anything to cover up, much less that she had responsibility for it. Then she announced she was “fed up” with a country too racist to accept a cabbage-president, before offering her prescription for success in politics. “People,” she wrote unironically, “want authenticity.”

For sure, there are seriously goofy Trump administration characters. There continues however to be a massive underappreciation for the number of true lunatics escaped from the just-completed Biden period. The whole issue of Biden’s competence is under investigation and may eventually become a criminal matter, making it even more amazing that someone like Jean-Pierre would write a memoir at all, much less one this detached from reality. Is politics just a jobs program for crazy people? I don’t know how to read this book and conclude anything else.