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Former Biden press secretary is ready to tell Americans the truth? Give me a break.

Former Biden press secretary is ready to tell Americans the truth? Give me a break.

USA Today09-06-2025
Former Biden press secretary is ready to tell Americans the truth? Give me a break. | Opinion The knives are now out inside the Democratic Party. And the party is bleeding, not only Americans' support and trust but also its last remaining drops of honesty and truth.
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Karine Jean-Pierre talks exit from Democratic party in new book
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre talks about leaving the Democratic party in her upcoming book slated for release in October.
The Democratic Party continues to self-destruct, and I am here for it.
Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has teased a tell-all memoir about former President Joe Biden and the administration she served for nearly three years. 'Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines' is stoking claims that Jean-Pierre is a grifter, profiting off her time in the administration by trashing the former president and the political party that gave her prominence.
Knives are out among Democrats for one of their own who has now betrayed them.
Like other books that have recently exposed details about Biden's poor health, Jean-Pierre's book raises questions about the White House cover-up that attempted to hide the president's mental and physical decline from voters.
It also calls into question Jean-Pierre's honesty: Why did she wait until now, when she can profit from it, to tell the truth about the former commander in chief?
Former White House colleagues turn on former Biden press secretary
Democrats are now a minority party in America. The GOP controls the White House, the Senate and the U.S. House along with a majority of governor's offices and state legislatures. The Democratic Party has lost Americans' trust because of its leaders' penchant for gaslighting, not just about Biden's health but also on issues like immigration, border security and the economy.
Jean-Pierre, who now claims to be an independent, certainly isn't helping her former colleagues rebuild that lost trust.
Details from the book are still sketchy, but Jean-Pierre should provide readers with an inside look at what happened after Biden's disastrous debate with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump a year ago this month.
Jean-Pierre's coworkers have already reacted to the book with contempt.
"Former colleagues expressed confusion at how Jean-Pierre seemingly intends to paint Biden as a victim while pinning her own decision to leave the party on his 'broken' White House," Politico reported, citing multiple former Biden administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist who worked on the Commerce Department's communications team during Biden's presidency, took umbrage with Jean-Pierre's assertion that the Democratic Party betrayed Biden.
'Kamala Harris and the entire Biden/Harris campaign did hero's work to avoid losing 400 electoral votes and giving Republicans a supermajority in Congress, which is what would have happened if he stayed on the ticket,' Legacki told Politico. 'It's more productive to focus on that, and thank Biden for doing the responsible thing by stepping aside, than it is to pretend this was an unwarranted act of betrayal.'
But party insiders continuing to squabble over whether a now former president was or was not betrayed by fellow Democrats entirely misses the larger point.
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Far too many Democrats, Jean-Pierre included, worked hard to deceive Americans. Their willful lack of self-awareness about their gaslighting and dishonesty is why the party has shown no signs of recovering from the last disastrous election cycle.
Karine Jean-Pierre's book about Biden isn't the first
Jean-Pierre's book will be far from the first to address the deception at the heart of the Biden White House.
On May 20, journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson released "Original Sin," which describes in detail Biden's cognitive decline and the mind-boggling efforts with which his inner circle and the Democratic Party tried to hide the truth from Americans.
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Conservatives had long been suspicious about Biden's health, but journalists with White House access failed to ask tough questions then.
Now that it's too late to make a real difference, those who were silent when it mattered most are more than ready to profit from belated exposés about the former president's failing health.
The knives are now out inside the Democratic Party.
And the party is bleeding, not only Americans' support and trust but also its last remaining drops of honesty and truth.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.
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