On the back cover of Independent, Rachel Maddow calls Karine Jean-Pierre’s new memoir “not your typical Washington book,” praising it as “a brave firecracker of a book” that “[cuts] a swath through the political class, telling blunt, gritty truths and sparing no one.”
Keep up with the latest in LGBTQ+ news and politics. Sign up for The Advocate's email newsletter.
In Independent, out Tuesday from Legacy Lit, the former White House press secretary offers a candid, unsparing view of what she calls a “five-alarm fire” threatening American democracy. Through a blend of memoir and political analysis, Jean-Pierre chronicles how she rose inside government, why she left the Democratic Party, and what she believes must change if the country is to survive the authoritarian turn ushered in by President Donald Trump’s return to power.
Related: Karine Jean-Pierre on misinformation, the White House, and making queer history (exclusive)
“I’ve learned how to keep my cool in the face of turmoil,” she writes early in the book. “But now that our democracy hangs in the balance, those days of channeling the thoughts and decisions of others are over. I am free to speak for myself, ready to tell what I’ve seen, and eager to say what I think.”
Jean-Pierre, the first Black, immigrant, and out LGBTQ+ person to serve as White House press secretary, writes like somebody unburdened by constraints. In Independent, she writes that Trump “allowed his unelected billionaire donor Elon Musk to fire tens of thousands of federal workers and turned the deportation of undocumented migrants into a twisted reality show.”
In conversation with The Advocate last week, Jean-Pierre described the Trump administration’s current approach as openly authoritarian. “They are literally ticking off everything on [Project 2025’s] list,” she said. “They’re not hiding it. Every vulnerable community, everyone, all of us, are under attack right now by this administration.”
Leaving the Democratic Party
The title Independent signals a personal and political shift.
“The Democrats’ blue tent that once felt big enough to hold all the pieces of a Black, queer, immigrant woman like me has collapsed,” she writes. “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.” In June, when news of her book spread, outrage from some corners and accusations of back-turning were leveled.
Jean-Pierre told The Advocate she didn’t expect the announcement to provoke such intense reaction. “It was actually pretty surprising to me that it caused such a reaction,” she said. “People were like, ‘Oh my God, is she going to the other side?’ But this isn’t about sides. It’s about saving democracy.”
Related: Karine Jean-Pierre on being a Black lesbian working for the White House: 'It matters' (exclusive)
In the book, she clarifies that independence doesn’t mean disinterest but that the party needs to "earn" her vote.
“I also no longer want people to look at me and automatically assume I’m a Democrat because of my gender and the color of my skin,” she writes. “I want Democrats to earn my vote, to fight for it the way I and so many Black women have fought for them.”
Biden, Harris, and the party’s betrayal
Jean-Pierre devotes some of the book’s most emotional passages to President Biden’s decision not to seek reelection. She calls it "one of the most patriotic acts I’d ever seen.”
“Whatever ego it took for Biden to reach the pinnacle of power, he put it aside to patch together a party on the verge of imploding,” she writes.
But she reserves her most substantial criticism for how party leaders treated Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the aftermath.
“One day, I ran into a member of the California congressional delegation. There’d been a group text or call, the congressperson told me. Nancy Pelosi was on it. And she was saying that Biden needed to abandon his reelection bid. It was my first hint of what was going on behind the president’s back,” Jean-Pierre writes.
She adds, “I no longer want to be affiliated with a party whose leadership has been so incredibly disappointing in the way it treated Biden, in the way it quietly hazed Harris,” she writes.
Related: Karine Jean-Pierre leaves Democratic Party, becomes independent
In the interview, she elaborated: “When he decided to step aside and pass the baton to Vice President Kamala Harris, there was still talk she should not be the nominee. And I thought to myself, what are we doing here? The other guy is a lot worse. Are you not paying attention?”
Jean-Pierre said the moment crystallized her break from the party.
“If this is a party that’s going to attack someone in this way, as we’re just a few months out of the election, what kind of party is this?” she said.
“Don’t take the bait”
For Jean-Pierre, the party’s struggles are moral as much as strategic—especially on LGBTQ+ rights. Some Democrats, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, have wobbled on their support for transgender rights, particularly when it comes to whether trans kids can participate in sports.
“It makes me really angry when I hear [Democrats wavering],” she told The Advocate. “We know what Republicans are all about. It is very much a party of hate.”
She added, “The Democratic Party needs to be fighting for all vulnerable communities. Period. Full stop. That is a big-tent party, and if you don’t do that, you’re losing the ethos, the center, the heart of the party.”
Related: Karine Jean-Pierre pushes back at reporter's transphobic question about Title IX at White House briefing
Her advice to Democrats tempted to mute support for trans Americans was blunt: “Don’t take the bait. Don’t go down the rabbit hole of whatever Republicans are talking about when it comes to the trans community. Your stand is clear. [You] are a party for everyone and are going to protect everyone.”
The cost of telling the truth
From her years at the podium, Jean-Pierre learned how speaking hard truths comes with consequences.
“There is sometimes a cost when you speak your truth,” she said. “People will turn on you. They won’t believe you. They think you’re lying all the time.” Yet she insisted that push-and-pull with reporters was democracy itself. “Freedom of the press is democracy in action,” she said. “Even if it got contentious—and it was contentious all the time—we respected that freedom.” She said that while she’s seen clips of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s interactions with the press, she hasn’t watched one of her briefings.
Related: Lauren Boebert mercilessly mocked for calling White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre a 'DEI hire'
In Independent, she warns of what she calls the “Trump double standard” for how the press covers power. “When he was running against Biden, then Harris, I didn’t see one story about Trump’s age, though he was only three years younger than Biden,” she writes. “During the campaign, Trump would froth at the mouth for hours on end, bringing up the fictitious movie villain Hannibal Lecter and, at one appearance, making obscene gestures with a microphone. But no reporter asked to speak to his doctor.”
She said it’s even worse now that Trump is in power and breaking norms daily as the country marches toward authoritarianism. “There is a double standard when it comes to Trump and how he’s covered,” she said in her interview with The Advocate. “History will judge how this moment was treated and covered.”
Fighting for the experiment
For all its frustration, Independent is not a work of despair. Jean-Pierre insists that citizens can reclaim agency. “Every vote is a brick in the foundation,” she writes. “Every cycle is a test. Democracy doesn’t begin or end with any one leader or party. It begins—and can end—with you.”
In her interview, she expanded on that idea, warning that silence is complicity. “We have to have big, broad, bold coalitions and be unapologetic about it to move forward,” she said. “Once they come for one, they come for all.”
Related: Karine Jean-Pierre gives emotional final White House Press Briefing
Paraphrasing Biden, she reminded that “our democracy, this country, is an experiment,” adding, “For it to continue as a democracy, we all have to fight for it.”
Jean-Pierre ends Independent with a sharper call to vigilance and participation.
“Be skeptical when others demand allegiance,” she writes. “And above all, show up, because the point of becoming independent is not to stand alone.”
Charlie Kirk DID say stoning gay people was the 'perfect law' — and these other heinous quotes