Is Ross Perot’s Reform Party still around for Kamala Harris to flee to? Asking for a former vice president.
Because, at this point, this seems like the logical endgame to all of this. What started as a trickle of President Joe Biden’s insiders giving anonymous heads-ups to the few journalists willing to report on his declining mental and physical condition before the June 27, 2024, debate that was the rhetorical equivalent of the emperor striding out on stage fully naked and demanding we acknowledge his awesome new suit feels like it reached peak defection on Wednesday when it was announced former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had left the Democratic Party and was becoming an independent due to her experience inside the broken Biden White House.
She will reveal all the circumstances that led to this in October in a book called, um, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines.”
A little on the nose for my tastes, but I guess if you’re hawking yet another Now the Truth Can Be Told™ tome about the decline and fall of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and his administration, you can’t be subtle.
The defining feature of these exercises of pseudo-brave post-facto journalism isn’t necessarily for the money, at least not beyond the publishing houses that churn them out. Mind you, I’m sure Jake Tapper doesn’t regret being able to more easily justify to the wife buying the Porsche instead of the Audi as the new daily driver thanks to the proceeds from “Original Sin” — but the real benefit for the authors is retconning their résumé to go from enablers of Joe Biden’s enfeeblement to exposers of it.
Not that publishers Hachette Book Group are framing KJP’s memoir this way: “Jean-Pierre didn’t come to her decision to be an Independent lightly,” the company said in a media release, according to the New York Post.
“She has served two American presidents, [Barack] Obama and Biden … She takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision,” it continued.
“In a hard-hitting yet hopeful critique, Jean-Pierre defines what it means to be part of the growing percentage of our fractured electorate that is Independent, why it can be worthwhile to carve a political space more loyal to personal beliefs than a party affiliation, and what questions you need to ask yourself to determine where you fit politically.”
Here are the questions I’m assuming Karine Jean-Pierre had to ask herself “to determine where you fit politically,” at least as regards to how she presents herself in this book:
- Did I dissemble in the service of an obviously senescent man who could not do the job of president and who outsourced the gig to an inner circle of enforcers who thought — quite wrongly — they could take his place and hide this fact until Jan. 20, 2029?
- Do I want to be known for this?
- If no, can I plausibly distance myself from the trainwreck by some very public act of soi-disant defiance of Biden and his other enablers?
- If yes, am I able write a book that publishers will be interested in, or financially sound enough to hire a ghostwriter to pen one for me?
Nor is she the first person to essentially come to this conclusion. There is a fifth step for some in the political world who answer no to the fourth question, which is: “If no, can I become a source for someone who is writing a book publishers are interested in?” Rest assured, KJP’s “Independent” will feature no shortage of those.
The primary problem here is that KJP is a little late to the party with this coming out in October — which is why, I suspect, she had to shear herself of her party affiliation to get a deal.
Let’s do a quick recap of the books that have already come out, shall we? It’d be difficult to compose a full history of these quickies — and one suspects, alas, that “Original Sin” will be the one we all remember in a decade’s time — but it’s probably best to go through why these books were written to tell us, in fuller detail, what we all already knew.
Among the first batch of these books was “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History” by Chris Whipple. Whipple was previously the author of borderline hagiographical “insider” account of the 46th presidency, “The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,” so he clearly had some reputational damage to fix up.
“I have fresh reporting on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis of Biden’s final days, and obviously his decline is a major part of the story,” Whipple told Politico before the book’s release in April.
“I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”
Here was a guy who was basically writing a campaign ad for the president subtitled “Inside Joe Biden’s White House” published only two years prior and he was just now discovering this? If he was — and I don’t happen to believe that, but that’s between him and the Creator — count him among those who “believed what they wanted to believe.”
Also among those who “believed what they wanted to believe” is Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who shows up in that book as one of Whipple’s major named sources. He was stunned — stunned, I tell you! — to return to Team Biden for the debate prep and find a president bereft of any mental or physical energy, so much so he couldn’t get through either practice debate they held for him.
“At his first meeting with Biden in Aspen Lodge, the president’s cabin, [Klain] was startled,” Whipple wrote.
“He’d never seen him so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.”
“That evening Biden met again with Klain and his team, [Biden aides] Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Bruce Reed. ‘We sat around the table,’ said Klain. ‘[Biden] had answers on cards, and he was just extremely exhausted. And I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.’”
Klain also described the point in debate prep where Biden thought it would be a good idea to look visibly confused every time Donald Trump talked.
“If he looked perplexed when Trump talked, voters would understand that Trump was an idiot. Klain replied: ‘Sir, when you look perplexed, people just think you’re perplexed. And this is our problem in this race,’” Whipple wrote.
So, two reputations laundered. No longer enablers, now exposers.
Then we come to “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” History will note how much of the book was written by Tapper and how much by co-author Alex Thompson of Axios, one of the few sources willing to risk reputational ruin by reporting on Biden’s declining state during his time in the White House.
Tapper, meanwhile, needed to memory-hole this kind of prattling he did on CNN:
SUPERCUT!
Before profiting off the media conspiracy to hide Biden’s decline, @jaketapper helped run it pic.twitter.com/j5m7h4JVA3
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 27, 2025
Also laundered through the book is the reputation of George Clooney, actor and Democrat donor extraordinaire. After the debate performance, Clooney began the project in earnest by writing a guest essay in The New York Times on July 10 — almost two weeks after the debate — titled “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee” and revealing that at a fundraiser he’d hosted for Biden, the man was doddering and forgetful.
Clips of Biden acting confused and wandering around from this event, it’s worth reminding everyone, are among the ones Karine Jean-Pierre labeled “cheap fakes” from the White House podium during her tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania.
In April, in an interview with the same newspaper — ostensibly to promote the Broadway production of his play, “Good Night, and Good Luck” — he said of the opinion piece, “I don’t know if it was brave. It was a civic duty.”
(Translation: I don’t know if I should be patted on the back for that. Let me pat myself on the back for that, though.)
And then came the one excerpt from “Original Sin” that everyone seems to know pretty well by this point, which is essentially where Clooney realized — long before the debate — that the president was no longer with it:
Biden hobbled out from around the corner. Clooney knew the president had just arrived from the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Apulia, Italy, that morning and might be tired, but hooooooooooly s***, he wasn’t expecting this.
The president appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022. He was taking tiny steps and had an aide guiding him by his arm. …
Biden looked at him. “Thank you for being here,” he said. “Thank you for being here.”
“You know George,” the assisting aide told the president, gently reminding him who was in front of him.
“Yeah, yeah,” the president said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fundraiser. “Thank you for being here.” …
It was obvious to many standing there that the president did not know who George Clooney was.
This was June 13 — two weeks before the debate, and nearly a month before Clooney wrote that piece as part of a coordinated campaign of increasing pressure on the part of Democratic Party honchos, elected and unelected, to get Biden out of the campaign.
His intervention still didn’t work, by the way, and it literally took Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer from doing everything possible besides breaking into the White House, putting Joe, Jill, and Hunter in burlap sacks, taking them to an undisclosed location, and forcing them to drop out. For that matter, we don’t know that this didn’t happen. Maybe that’s what Jean-Pierre will reveal in her book.
The point is, Clooney has plenty of reputational damage to repair, and he’s laundered it through “Original Sin,” as well.
Now, to top that, we have the 50-year-old most recent Democratic White House press secretary leaving the Democratic Party to sell books and clean up her reputation.
The only question is who’s next and what their hook will be. The ball’s in your court, Kamala. That Reform Party nomination for president is generally a pretty easy gig in terms of securing. Just a reminder.
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