Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary under former President Joe Biden, admitted that she didn’t think Kamala Harris would beat Donald Trump in 2024.
“The truth was, I never really believed Harris could win,” Jean-Pierre wrote in her new book “Independent,” per Fox News. “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.”
Jean-Pierre said in the book, released Tuesday, that she wanted to be optimistic.
“Harris and so many others had fought and hoped so hard,” she wrote, according to the conservative outlet. “I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe. But in the end, I was proven right. The United States just wasn’t there yet.”
Trump swept the major battleground states and also captured the popular vote in a victory that Harris questionably called “the closest presidential election in the 21st century.”
In her own recent book, “107 Days,” Harris said one of the turning points of her campaign was when she said on “The View” she wouldn’t do anything different than Biden had done.
“I had no idea I’d just pulled the pin on a hand grenade,” Harris wrote.
Jean-Pierre had already made headlines for defending Biden’s mental acuity in her book. But doubts fueled by his doddering debate against Trump led him to drop out and endorse Harris to be the Democrats’ nominee.
“It was deeply disturbing that after shoving Biden aside in a disgraceful display, the party’s elders couldn’t summon enough know-how to help an intelligent, accomplished attorney like Harris defeat an ignorant former reality TV star,” she wrote. “The party had to redefine its mission, and figure out a way to move forward without publicly tearing apart our standard bearers or leaving their successors dangling in the wind.”