The Trump administration is allowing SNAP benefits to expire on November 1, and the U.S. could be facing the worst hunger crisis we’ve seen since The Great Depression. Find a food bank, community fridge, or mutual aid hub near you. And, with all my heart, FDT and everyone who enables and empowers this fascist crusade.
Losing an election breaks your brain. Whether you’re the candidate, a campaign staffer, or someone close to the situation, running for office in general is unpleasant business. At a certain point, the prospect of victory is what propels you through that unpleasantness. The higher the office and the closer the race, the worse it is when you lose. I’m speaking as someone who lost a local election and it wasn’t remotely close, yet I’m still processing the grief of that experience a whole election cycle later.
I say all this to say: after her party lost the most high-stakes presidential election of this generation, Karine Jean-Pierre is simply not ready to be out here talking right now. Yet out here talking she is, with her memoir ostensibly titled Independent: A Look Inside A Broken White House, but spiritually titled Betrayal: What REALLY Happened With My Baseball Team, Disaster at Knuckle Beach? In the book, she details how it wasn’t a policy position that drove her from the Democratic Party for which she served as a mouthpiece for years; nor the general rightward shift that party leadership has been openly making in a bid to be more “strategic” and “pragmatic.” It was entirely because of how the Democratic Party pushed Joe Biden out of the running in 2024.
Which, like, fine. I am the last person to expect any kind of radicalism from a 50-something White House press secretary, though she would argue that her Blackness, queerness, and femme-ness imbue her with radicalism on their own. Anyone whose job is defending the most powerful institution in the land, even just rhetorically, is pretty bought in to how institutions function. I’m not even that surprised that her big political decision is motivated by a personal grievance. Everyone’s politics are at least a little inconsistent and very often driven by feelings that we then try to find moral justification for. I want better from someone playing with so much power, but I don’t expect better.
No, what’s really blowing me is how deeply incompetent she is at finding a moral justification for her hurt feelings, and at articulating said justification. Keep in mind: articulating justifications for political decisions was her whole job! For multiple years! But in the interviews of hers that I’ve seen and read, she fumbles even the most basic softballs about her stance.1
One particularly frustrating aspect to her inadequate prep is that some of what she’s saying could make sense. Por ejemplo: when she complains that Democratic leadership’s reluctance to anoint Kamala Harris as the nominee was an insult, but that she also never truly believed that Harris could win, the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner jumps on this as an inconsistency. And unfortunately, Jean-Pierre doesn’t’ do much to convince him otherwise:
…one reason some people thought that Harris should not be the nominee is that they did not think she could win, which is why I was surprised to read in your book, a little later on, that “the truth was, I never really believed Harris could win.” That’s why I’m a little confused when you say it was an insult to try to get her off the ticket.
But two things should be true, right? The thing that I say the second time actually proves the thing that I said the first time, right? Because it’s a feeling that we have. The reason I felt that is because of how we’re treated as Black women. We’re not elevated, we’re not protected, we’re not taken seriously. She was the Vice-President for heaven’s sake. But the reality of it is that being a Black woman, being Black and being a woman, it’s just tough. It’s hard. It makes it harder. And she ran a fantastic campaign, but it wasn’t good enough for some people. That is heartbreaking.
[two questions later]
Many people who did not think she could win wanted to replace her on the ticket because they thought beating Donald Trump was the most important thing for America, for any number of reasons having to do with race, foreign policy, whatever else, and that it was imperative to win the election. So what I was confused by was you saying that you didn’t think Harris could win, but then you attack other people who didn’t seem to think Harris could win by saying they were insulting her.
Yes. Well, again, I wish you could walk in my body and live my life, and then I think you could understand what I’m saying. I really do, because I think any other Black woman would understand what I’m saying. What it truly is is that it wasn’t just an open primary or a brokered convention. There was disrespect to her as well. It was discounting her and her position and who she was. That’s what it felt like. This is a very unique thing that I don’t think anyone would understand unless you walked in our bodies and lived our lives. My feeling was not about her not being qualified. It was about people not being able to see past her being Black and a woman. It’s not that confusing for us because we live this life day in and day out.
Christ, she’s like a Catherine wheel that’s fallen off its stick.
And the thing is, her feelings aren’t actually that hard to parse! She could have said, “I know from experience that this world does not support or protect Black women, especially when they’re public figures, and the way Democrats treated Kamala Harris bore that out. I feel justified in being pessimistic, because the powers that be did not take her seriously, and here we are.” That’s two overlong sentences, sure, but it’s also less evasive and convoluted than what Jean-Pierre said. I didn’t write a book about this, nor did I ever serve as White House Press Secretary, but I could come up with that defense without hardly needing to think about it. And, at the risk of repeating myself—coming up with defenses for a political decision was. her. job.
But this is how the whole political economy works, isn’t it? The high-profile members of an outgoing administration cycle into high-level think tank jobs, or network talking head positions, or podcasting.2 They write a tell-all book about their experience. They stay in the ecosystem, even if they claim to be too iconoclastic and provocative for it. They reinforce the status quo, so they can have a status quo to come back to—even if they make a big show of leaving their party.
(Note that Jean-Pierre specifically says she’s not telling anyone else to stop being a Democrat. That’s just for her to do, because she is protecting her peace™️.)
They do all of these things, even if they’re not mentally ready to jump back into the fray, because the political economy demands it. So none of them heal, and so none of them learn, and so none of them change.
It’s sadly ironic that, in that way, Karine Jean-Pierre has spent her book tour so far proving that she’s still the right spokesperson for the Democratic Party as it exists today. No cohesion, no energy—no vision, when we need a true opposition party the most. Her successor is responding to questions about where Trump derives his unconstitutional authority with “your mom,” and all Jean-Pierre can do is say that people were rude to her and her boss. What a waste.
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