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- [00:00]
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- [01:04]
Mike Pesca
It's Wednesday, October 29, 2025. From Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. And it's back. Baggy jeans. Well, yes, but also diphtheria. Headline New York Times. A killer of children vanquished by a vaccine is resurgent. I'll read you a little bit about diphtheria. Did not know this about diphtheria. Caused by bacteria that produce a powerful toxin that kill cells, usually in the throat and tonsils, creating a thick gray membrane of dead tissue that can grow large enough to block airways and cause suffocation, especially among children. Where is diphtheria hitting the global South? War torn lands like Somalia and Chad and Sudan. Places where people would be desperate to have the vaccine. They just can't get the vaccine or they're refugees or they. They're denied the vaccine as a tactic of war in the global South. We eradicated diphtheria the world over and then watched it come back because of civil wars and collapsing health systems. And this is a tragedy that people go undiagnosed. Children go undiagnosed or are treated too late. Their parents, like I said, would love to save them. There is nothing they could do when medicine doesn't reach them in time. In the United States, a similar but actually totally opposite thing is happening. Measles is coming back, but not because of scarcity, because of choice. Epidemiologists say there's an 83% chance of a major outbreak in the next 20 years. JAMA just had a study. Next 25 years. If vaccination rates Stay the same as today. And it used to be over 95% vaccination, herd immunity, no measles. But today, 851,000 cases of measles could occur in the next quarter century and they would be deadly. And that is entirely our choice. People with every resource at their disposal are refusing vaccines. Bad math, worse ideas. Influencers, government officials have conspired to foist upon the richest country in the world conditions that are unavoidable in the worst places in the world. Scarcity and abundance. When we have too little, we scramble to fix problems. When we have too much, we can't help but invent new ones. It just seems latent in the human condition. Prosperity is the better way to go. It overall reduces suffering. But it seems we retreat back to stasis this baseline level of suffering and baseline level of fear. Maybe that's why we seek out horror movies and roller coasters to simulate the danger our ancestors faced. Because the ancestors who survived them, they were alert. That's how they were our ancestors and we are their descendants. Because they were the alive ones, they, the sanguine ones were eaten. Today, the same wiring does seem to make us misread the world. Crime is always reported as worse than it was last year. It's always rising, even when it's not rising, which generally over the last quarter decade has been the case. Not rising. We think it is. Sometimes it is. A few years ago it was. Psychologically, it's impossible to convince an anti vaxxer they're wrong. I mean, it would probably be easy to convince a refugee in Sudan they're wrong not to take the vaccine. Especially when they're crying for the vaccine and other things like safety and food in poorer countries they're begging for what we issue. I have a solution. It's a coalition of the immunized. Which is the kind of person who recognizes this is a problem. Probably the kind of person who's more likely to read about diphtheria in the global south and think that's a shame. We get these people together and they donate privately or they and this used to be a really good way forward. They organize themselves publicly and elect officials who don't cancel things like aid to the global South. They're about the same people now, I have to say, campaigning on that, hey, elect us, elect our people, elect us the vaccinated preferred choices to help the suffering Sudan. That's not going to work. You have to get elected on the price of bacon and practical concerns. But once you do, you use your Power to help the world. Why? Because abundance brings responsibility to use for the desperate, not to imitate them. On the show today, an interesting interview, a different kind of show I had on Karine Jean Pierre. She's the Biden official who came out with a book called Independent. And then she went on a press tour and she got a lot of pushback because she didn't give a lot of cogent answers. Well, I had her a week and a half ago. I conducted the interview. I didn't understand what she was saying. I kind of understood, or thought I understood why she was saying it. But she wasn't doing a service to you, the listener. I tried. I gave her enough room to make her case, and that was a mistake because later she said our interview time is over. And then when I pressed her to actually be tangible, she couldn't. You'll hear it all because I decided to play it for you. I was going to spike the interview, something I've done, I don't know, three to five times in the last 11 years. That's how unusable I, I thought it was. But in light of the press tour she's been on, I'm going to let you decide to maybe consider it not as so much an interview meant to be illuminating, but, and I say this in the pre spiel, I do a little bit of an artifact to try to understand our moment, or at least Karine Jean Pierre's moment. So structure of the show is I give a preamble because I found that if I air an interview and then come back and discuss it, people will say, that wasn't fair. You didn't give the guest the last word. So I orient you in my next segment about what you're going to hear, maybe why you're going to hear it. I also give you some background if you haven't been following about this Karine Jean Pierre press tour. And then there'll be a break and you'll hear my interview, which I was going to spike, but now I play for you. I'm sorry. Slash. You're welcome. Up next.
- [07:04]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Foreign.
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Mike Pesca
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Interviewer/Commentator
And then what happened was the debate performance, everything is downstream of that.
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Karine Jean-Pierre
And no one is saying that the debate performance wasn't shocking, wasn't a disappointment. No one is saying that disappointment is such a light.
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Mike Pesca
More combatively, Tim Miller of the Bulwark made some pretty obvious points about Biden's abilities which John Pierre objected to.
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Interviewer/Commentator
Like the notion that this person was up for being president to 2028, was up for the communications responsibility of this job and fighting. No. Well, if you won again, he would have to have been president all the way till 2028. I think that's an absurd thing to suggest that he could have been president. Do you think he could have been president in 2028?
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Karine Jean-Pierre
Look, I can't speak to that. Here's what I obviously know.
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Interviewer/Commentator
Was he up for it, though? I guess he didn't have the vigor for this fight.
- [11:51]
Karine Jean-Pierre
We have to rewind the tape a little bit and not be revisionist historians here.
- [11:55]
Mike Pesca
Eventually, Miller stated the obvious to the communications expert that Joe Biden was poor at communicating and Jean Pierre communicated her dissent from that rather indisputable point.
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Interviewer/Commentator
He couldn't talk about it. He wasn't campaigning that vigorously.
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Karine Jean-Pierre
No, no, no, wait. First of all, first of all, he did talk about them, whether it broke through or not. He did, Tim. He did talk about.
- [12:17]
Interviewer/Commentator
He talked way less to the press than Donald Trump does. Way less. And he wasn't out there at all. He wasn't good off the cuff. He wasn't doing press conferences. Let's just be real, like he didn't do night.
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Karine Jean-Pierre
But, Tim, that's not true. Tim, you're conflating all of that. That's what you're doing. No, you're. First you're telling me he didn't talk well about it. Then you're telling me he didn't talk.
- [12:36]
Interviewer/Commentator
He didn't do either. He didn't talk very often. And when he did, it wasn't very good. He sounded very old.
- [12:41]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Maybe we weren't paying attention to what we were doing at the I paid attention.
- [12:44]
Interviewer/Commentator
I'm with you on the policies. I'm talking about his performance, the president.
- [12:48]
Mike Pesca
The latest interview of Jean Pierre was by Isaac Chotner, a print interview in the New Yorker. He just read parts of Independent back to Jean Pierre and got denials and corrections. So this was a book that early on says this. Then I saw the party somehow fumble the ball again when Biden left the race and his vice president, Kamala Harris became the nominee, somehow it was unable or somehow it was unable to help a trailblazing, extremely accomplished former prosecutor who wanted to uplift everyone in our society. Defeat Trump, a habitual liar and convicted felon who openly embraced the politics of cruelty. Okay, that's not a new observation, but it is odd considering that later on in her own book, as Chotner points out, Jean Pierre says, the truth was I never really believed Harris could win. So if I had to guess what Jean Pierre was doing in calling herself an independent, it was attempting to save her reputation and define herself as something other than a Biden loyalist to the end, who was partly responsible for the choices that damned the 2024 Democratic campaign, whoever the Democrat was, and therefore brough Donald Trump to power. Again, a clean break from the Democrats in order to position herself as a truth teller outside that corrupt system. But in doing so, she never articulates, at least to my eye and ear, how she actually differs from the Democratic Party, just that they done Joe Biden wrong, only wait by trying to get him out of the race earlier answer in so many interviews, I can't speak to that. So when I just said to my eye and ear, I should note that I was included in the book tour, I sat down with Jean Pierre eight days before the book's publication, as is often the case with every intention that our discussion would air when the book was out. However, after talking to the former press secretary for a drawn out and contentious 30 minutes, I decided not to torture you, my listeners, with this interview. I said immediately afterwards, well, we can't air that. She said nothing. We talked over each other and what she did say and what I did say was nothing but meaningless bickering. But then we heard that week of Jean Pierre's press tour, confusing everyone who participated in it as questioner or audience member. And so therefore I actually am going to play the interview now. Now I submit it not so much with the hope that it could be illuminating about what Jean Pierre actually thinks. But perhaps, and this is unlikely, perhaps, consider it a document in Attempted Press management and the politics of futility. I do not want to put my thumb on the scale too much beforehand, except to beg your indulgence through what I know is a first half which is mostly full of question evasion. Am I giving Jean Pierre more ground and grace than I should have? The grace, actually, I don't regret. I want to be polite to everyone, but I also want to press them to give me actual answers. And when I fail to do that, I feel like I failed. And it was Pierre's tactics that conspired to make me fail, but also the ground that I gave her. She talked for a long time and then strictly enforced the exact 30 minute time allotment that the interview had. I was a couple of minutes late. It's often harried around here on the gist. And connecting via computer is, while usually reliable, not always. I wanted for you, the audience, to know what made Karine Jean Pierre, in her mind, in her words, an independent. She refused to answer. She just said, read a book. But I have listeners to a podcast who don't have the book in front of them. She could have given me an answer. Was she so inclined? Or if she actually had an answer. I also realized she was engaged in this running out the clock strategy, trying to say nothing as soon as she surmised this wasn't going to be a softball interview. I did. Let me tell you my tactics of this interview. I went into it knowing that I could ask certain kinds of questions that I wasn't going to get the answer to. I've talked to many press secretaries and there is a kind of question where you ask out a thing they said from the podium that wasn't true. And the press secretary will always say there's maybe some satisfaction in a gotcha. But the press secretary will always say, it is my job to represent the President's position the best as I knew it at the time. I've never gotten anywhere with that kind of question. Maybe it's satisfying to the audience to expose someone as, quote, unquote, a liar. But to be clear, I've tried this time and time again, and in the time I had with someone who was calling herself an Independent, I didn't think that would be the most fruitful full use of your time. Also, I didn't want to attempt to cite chapter and verse of areas where Joe Biden seemed to exhibit mental decline before our eyes and ask her, how could you not have seen that? Having read Independent, I know that John Pierre disagrees with anything other than Joe Biden was just aging as a regular person ages. She denies that Joe Biden was experiencing mental decline. You'll hear that in the interview. I concede the point. She's actually uninterested in counter evidence. I say this because she writes early on in her book about Just Guess, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson and their book Original Sin. Quote, Tapper wrote a supposed tell all book about Biden original sin with Alex Thompson accusing him of a cover up of his mental decline and how his AIDS quash concerns. I never read Tapper's book and don't ever plan to because that does not track with what I saw in the White House. There actually is a potentially good question about how do you call something a supposed tell all if you have no idea if it told all because you refused to read it. But I also knew that I wouldn't get a great answer or I will say I had other questions I preferred to get to hoping they would bear fruit. I will tell you now they did not. So to this day I know she disagrees with the tactics surrounding Joe Biden's ouster. She will not weigh in on if she agrees or disagrees with Joe Biden's ouster. She criticizes Democrats after Harris's entry into the race for not helping Harris, a candidate who she says she didn't think would win. I honestly don't understand any of this. Having engaged with the book and Jean Pierre. I don't understand what makes her an independent other than the fact that the Democratic Party seems very upset with her. Perhaps logically she seems upset with the Democratic Party. There wasn't too much independent thought in the book or that we could engage. Her engagement with other journalists hasn't added much to the illumination of any of these fundamental questions. And after going somewhat nowhere for 20 minutes, I will tell you, I do ask a minute and twenty second long question, which is long, probably too long for a question, but I had to finally at that point you'll hear it. I had to get out all the points that were dammed up that just weren't getting answered, that were getting circled around. You will hear that she takes some time to criticize the question and calls it a tangent, even though it does get to the heart of what she wasn't answering. And then if you time it out, she gives a nearly five minute answer before saying that's it, the interview's over. I did try to press her. She left. Time was of the essence. See what you get, if anything, out of this interview. I didn't get much out of Karine Jean Pierre.
- [20:15]
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- [20:47]
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- [21:19]
Mike Pesca
Green Jean Pierre is here. You know her from well, she probably dominated more TV screens in the last four years than all but five Americans. And I even include Taylor Swift among them because she was a primary, if not the primary spokesman for the Biden White House. She's out with a memoir now. Independent A Look inside a Broken White House, outside the party lines. Hello, Karine, thanks for joining us on the gist.
- [21:44]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Absolutely. Thank you for having me on the gist. Hello.
- [21:47]
Mike Pesca
So I know that most people will want to hear all about the brokenness of the White House. I wanna hear first about independent. That's it. You're done. You're not a Democrat. Why?
- [21:57]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Well, it's, you know, first of all, I hope that people read the book. Cause I lay that out in my way. The steps that it took for me to get to that space. And look, it wasn't an easy decision. I wanted to start part of it was I wanted to start a conversation. And I felt that as someone who, as you said, was out there for four years representing a president who was a Democrat, me making that change hopefully would start a conversation about how millions of people were feeling. I mean, millions of people feel that neither of the two parties represent them. And that's the broken system. When people don't feel like they're represented, when people don't feel like their voices are being heard, then you're losing folks to who should be continuing to participate in this process, in the civic process, who tune it off and turn away. And when I the really the first couple of weeks, first couple of months outside of the White House, I was bumping into Everyone, you know, at the coffee shop, going to the, at the airport, going somewhere, traveling, wherever I was going, and folks were coming up to me and there was such a deep disappointment and sadness as where the direction of this country and of the party that they were affiliated with. And so there is a big question to be asked here is like, how do we. The power. Let me step back. The power is not just and should not be whoever is in the White House. Right. The power should also be in the hands of the American people. And so this is what I'm trying to talk about. And this is the conversation that I wanna have. And that was part of why I made the decision. There's so many other parts of this too.
- [23:48]
Mike Pesca
So you must have been thinking about this as your job was to represent Joe Biden, advance the White House's policies. I mean, there must have been a time when your heart wasn't it.
- [23:58]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I talk about this in the book. I mean, really I do. Those three weeks between the president decide the president's debate and then the president deciding to step down and hand over obviously the reins to Vice President then Vice President Kamala Harris, there was a lot of heartbrokenness, if you will, on how I believe Joe Biden was treated and how this Democratic Party responded. And I believe this is a person, whatever beliefs, whatever thoughts you may have about President Joe Biden, but one thing that I think people would agree on is that he served his country for more than 50 years as a senator, vice president and president. He is someone who truly cares about this country. And the way that he was treated by his own party was incredibly heartbreaking. And so that was part of the thinking, the thinking process on this decision that I made. I want to be really clear while I am independent and it's very nuanced and I try to explain this in the book. I still very much believe in the ideology of the Democratic Party. I still want to see a big ten party. I still believe in compassion and humanity. And that is incredibly important to me. But how I voice that and how I speak to that, I want to do it from the outside of the two party system.
- [25:21]
Mike Pesca
So are you a Bidenist? How do we describe your politics?
- [25:25]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I say that last part. I missed the last part because I was reacting to the Bidenist.
- [25:30]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. How do we then, in a way that we understand in current political terms, describe your politics?
- [25:37]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Well, here, let's be really clear. I was a public servant. I was a public servant for four years. Now I'm a private citizen. And I think As a private citizen, we all are able. That's one of the things about living in this country. We're able to have various views. We are able to change our minds. We are able to speak very clearly, clearly or however we want about decisions about either this political process or how we see our lives moving forward or being made better. And so how I think people are going to see me is as someone who was obviously the spokesperson for President Biden, that he is someone that I truly believed in, someone that I believe really turned the country around for the American people and put the American people first. What I am speaking to is the moment that we're in, and the moment that we're in is a democracy that is consistently under attack, a rule of law that is not respected. In order to have a democracy, and this is something that is known, is that we need to fight for it, work for it every single day. Right now we have millions of Americans who are skeptical about our democracy. And that's scary to me. And that is what I am trying to speak to right now is how do we come together and fight for that? So I'm trying to meet the moment that we're in and how I got there obviously is connected to the beginning of that is connected to a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago. But the moment that we're in is I want to see a party that's fighting, that has a soul, like where's their soul? And that is what's missing right now. And you need a two party system that is working and functioning in order for our democracy to work. And right now I am not seeing.
- [27:28]
Mike Pesca
That how do the Democrats is currently constituted or when Joe Biden was the leader of the party or even when Kamala Harris was the nominee. How do they not embody everything that you just said? I heard many, many speeches and you talked about it from the podium, but so did both the candidate, Kamala Harris, and the president. Joe Biden talk endlessly about everything you just said about fighting for democracy every day. So what is the deficit or how is the Democratic Party not doing exactly that? That.
- [28:01]
Karine Jean-Pierre
So here's a couple things. The broken, the broken White House that I was speaking about that you see on the COVID of my book is the current White House. So just want to be very clear about that. And number two, again, I started off this conversation. It's not just me. There are Americans out there, millions of Americans who voted in 2020 for Joe Biden did not come out in 2024. Millions. And so we have to ask the question, why? Why did people stay home? That's number one. Number two, again, I have spoken to people who come up. Obviously, that is a small data point, but it's a data point nonetheless for me that people said they felt disenchanted by the process. They felt that the Democratic Party leadership wasn't fighting enough. And we saw that. Right? We've seen that. When it comes to. When we were talking about the budget, right. How they passed the budget, and they didn't have to. They could have. They could have. They could have held their ground. We don't need a strongly worded letter or a wonderful speech by a Democratic leader on the floor. We need to see a party that's behaving like an opposition party. We need to see a party that is a big tent party. And you cannot exclude people who, for the moment, in the short run, in the short term, fit some sort of political messaging. We need to make sure that we are fighting for everyone. And when I hear Democrat leadership saying, well, you know, we're not gonna be. We're not really supporting that group, or, you know, when you hear that, that's.
- [29:40]
Mike Pesca
Who do they say that about? Who does Democratic leaders should say we're not supporting?
- [29:43]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I mean, look, there. There. There. There are times where I've heard that from different leadership. I don't want to get into go down a rabbit hole, but I am saying that.
- [29:52]
Mike Pesca
No, just a specific one. Specific about who the Democratic leadership said. There's not.
- [29:56]
Karine Jean-Pierre
We heard that. Okay. When it comes to LGBTQ community, right. When you hear. When you hear leadership excluding members of that community, that's a problem because we are supposed to be a big ten party.
- [30:09]
Mike Pesca
Okay, so your lgbtq. This is, say, Seth Moulton and other. A few other congressmen saying that this issue, which is an 8020 issue, which favors the Republicans, is a bad issue for us. We need to moderate. Gavin Newsom said something like. Like I'm even rethinking about youth in sports. So these are things that you're saying. I just want to get some tangibles on the record. These are some things you think or why you defected from Democrats. They shouldn't be saying if they're real Democrats.
- [30:39]
Karine Jean-Pierre
It is. It is something I talk about in the book. I hope people take an opportunity to read the book. It's very nuanced. I lay it out. I do not think we should be scapegoating any community.
- [30:48]
Mike Pesca
I don't think Newsom and Moulton were scapegoating the transgender community.
- [30:52]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I mean, look it's in my book. I actually talk about this in the book. I talk about Gavin Newsom in the book.
- [30:57]
Mike Pesca
So you can tell me now.
- [30:59]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Wait, hold on. Wait a minute. I'm very clear about this. We should not be scapegoating anybody. I'm very, very clear about it to you right now. I've said that leadership has said this, and I don't think we should be doing that. I think that every. As a Democratic Party, there is a humanity that is connected to this party. There is a core of understanding that vulnerable communities need to be protected. There is an understanding that voices need to be heard. And right now, voices feel like they are not being heard right now. Many people in the party feels that the party is not fighting hard enough. And so. And there is a. There is also this question of where's the soul of this party? And so those are the things that are very real, very true in this moment that we're living in right now. And I feel as if this. My book, is supposed to start that conversation. It's supposed to open up. It doesn't matter if you agree with me or disagree. I want to have that conversation on how do we reimagine in this moment to build better, to do better, because we have an opportunity here, and if we don't act in this moment, we will lose this opportunity. We will.
- [32:29]
Mike Pesca
So one of your policy planks, one of the reasons that you defected from the Democratic Party was you felt that some fellow Democrats were inadequately representing the LGBTQ community. Although in the state of California, they did not pass any of the actual laws that came before them about LGBTQ people. Lgbtq, actually, the trans tia. I should include that because that's what we're talking about. What else? Give me another tangible. Where the Democratic Party lost you.
- [33:00]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Well, if you read my book, you'll see where the Democratic Party lost me. I really lay it out very clearly, especially in that three weeks I've said this already. I'll say it again. And how the person that I was working with, Joe Biden, was treated, how Kamala Harris, I believe, was treated by their own. By. By leadership in their Democratic Party. That's a part of it, too. I go. I go into detail about how those moments and what happened actually hurt us going into 2024. I truly believe it. Because you have, on the other side, Republicans sticking behind their guy. It didn't matter. For them, it didn't matter. The felonies. It didn't matter what was said about him. It didn't matter. They stuck behind his, their guy. And they did not blink an eye. They didn't. And by doing that, they showed force and they, they understood the moment that they were in and the importance of winning for their party. And I feel like we lost some of that. I mean, we were just a couple of months away and we were having fights internally, publicly, internally. But that was very public. And I do believe that hurt us going into the general election. And so I feel as if there was so many missteps that occurred. And that is part of the reason of why I made this very nuanced decision, very difficult decision to where I am today. And fast forward to the moment that we're in. As I've explained to you before, I don't think there's enough fight in what is currently in the Democratic Party. Well, you wrote the book Our Democracy is at Stake. Our Democracy is at Stake.
- [34:49]
Mike Pesca
You wrote the book before the current shutdown. And that shows. Fight, Fight. That Chuck Schumer didn't sign up for the last opportunity he had. One of the reasons was he said the stakes are so high. And what we thought that Donald Trump would do is unilaterally fire many federal workers, workers. That, in fact, has come to pass, or it looks like it's going to come to pass. So knowing what you know now about the current fight the Democrats are showing, do you have any thoughts or recalibrations about a, their willingness to fight or be the wisdom of the fight?
- [35:24]
Karine Jean-Pierre
So, look, I will say this. It is great that the Democrats are fighting right now. It is. I like that they're fighting and they have leverage, the leverages Republicans need their vote in order to reopen the government. Right. And that is their leverage. And so I'm glad that they're showing fight. I am. I'm not just gonna, not, not acknowledge something that I'm seeing currently. But we're also 10 months in. Right? We're also 10 months in. It took them 10 months. And so I think that we knew well over a year ago what this current administration was going to do. Project 2025, they laid it out very, very clearly, step by step. They have ticked off more than 40% of Project 2025. We were not blinded by what's happening currently. This is not his first administrative, first time in the White House. This is his second time. So we knew exactly what was about to happen. Some people have said to me, many people have said to me, well, why weren't we ready? Why were Democrats ready? Why weren't the Democratic leadership ready when they laid it out. It wasn't a surprise that Trump was going to lay off federal workers. They said it. That was part of their plan in Project 2025 DEI. That was part of their plan in Project 2025 LIFE. There's no, there's no surprise here. And yet we were not prepared Democrats leadership. And that is just a fact. That is not my personal opinion. That is just a fact objectively. And so now, the moment that we're in now is how do we reimagine the future? I'm talking about how do we move forward in reimagining the future for ourselves? And that honestly doesn't rest on just one person. This is, this is, hopefully the book is a road map for the American people on how to get engaged, stay engaged and be involved. And that is pro, that is, that is protesting. That is holding, holding Democrats and Republicans accountable. All of those things are, are, are ways to, you know, are ways to move forward in, in getting to a place that, that the country is working for all of us.
- [37:55]
Mike Pesca
I would like to go back and just to get you on the record, you've laid out a case that Democrats were in classic word disarray over Joe Biden's poor debate performance and then somewhat came out afterwards. I know that you dispute a lot of the characterizations of President Biden's mental decline. You were there, you saw it firsthand. Then again, you're also paid to wait.
- [38:17]
Karine Jean-Pierre
First of all, no, no, I just want to clear here because I, I, it's not. You said mental decline. That is an opinion that others had.
- [38:26]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, What I'm saying is you were there, you saw it firsthand. You rebut the idea that he had mental decline.
- [38:32]
Karine Jean-Pierre
That's better. Thank you.
- [38:33]
Mike Pesca
This is what I wanna get on the record. Are you saying. Because I'm really trying to reach for the tangible. Are you saying that Joe Biden should have been the 2024 nominee and the party should have started.
- [38:45]
Karine Jean-Pierre
That was a decision for him to make. I say this in the book and I actually lay out the tangibles. I lay out the tangibles for the American people. I just, moments ago that decision was for him to make and he made it. I did not like what it took for him to make the decision. But at the end of the day, it was his decision to make and I cannot, I'm not going to get into hypotheticals of what, what could have happened. What, you know, what, how about if he did this? How about if she did this? I'm just not going to get into that because we are in an existential threat right now. There are people who are disappearing from their neighborhoods. There are people who are scared and frightened. There are kids who are being taken away from their families. There are real threats. There are federal workers right now who need their paycheck and are not getting their paycheck because of this shutdown. And there are veterans who need programs and seniors who need programs who are not getting them right now. And we have to call that out, and we have to make it very clear. And what the Democrats need to be is be not a Democrat, Democrats, but an opposition party. This is the time to be an opposition party and to be very clear for them on how they are going to get us out of this. And I have a very clear roadmap that I laid out just moments ago of what the American people need to continue to do. There are tangibles. There are ways that to continue to fight. It's not going to be easy. Things are not going to turn around on a dime, but it's going to take consistency and time. But we all have to be in this together.
- [40:25]
Mike Pesca
But the easiest way to have done this would be to have won the 2024 election. Right? Everything depends on, oh, no, I'm wrong.
- [40:34]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Go ahead, tell me if I'm wrong.
- [40:37]
Mike Pesca
Oh, obviously, right.
- [40:39]
Karine Jean-Pierre
The outcome was not what we wanted. I'm not. Yeah, obviously, if we had won the 2024 election, that would have been. That would have been. That none of this conversation wouldn't be happening. Right.
- [40:49]
Mike Pesca
So now you want to be an opposition party. You're advising the Democrats to be an opposition party, but when you were an incumbent party, there was. It was perhaps incumbent upon you to retain the presidency, and the Democrats did not. The biggest reason was, as Kamala Harris says, she only had 107 days. And the perceived and perhaps totally unfair weakness of Joe Biden. Then you're also laying out some policies that, sorry to be crass and to look at polls, but I'm not looking at close polls. The one policy you talked about. I'll let you talk about another great policy that the Democrats. Tangible policy that the Democrats could get behind that would cause them to be popular. But the one policy you laid out, whether I agree with you or not, is a quite unpopular policy, which is backing, to some extent, standing up for the LGBTQ community with kids in sports. All right, I need to know why, when looking back, you don't want to talk about or it's totally unfair to talk about what happened to Joe Biden when we're on this knife's edge as a republic. And the easiest thing we could have done or the Democrats could have done was to win the last election. I mean, if people are looking to you as, okay, you founded this new independent party, I can't think of any rational person who wouldn't say, well, what was her theory of the case in 2020, 24? And it's something. It's something that I can't quite put my finger on. Stick with Joe Biden. Convince. Convince voters to do things they don't like.
- [42:16]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Well, first of all, I'm going to. Everything that you just said. There's so much incorrectness.
- [42:22]
Mike Pesca
Go ahead.
- [42:23]
Karine Jean-Pierre
And. And let me just correct the record here, because I don't agree with most of the things that you said, especially. Let me finish.
- [42:32]
Interviewer/Commentator
You just.
- [42:32]
Karine Jean-Pierre
You just went on a tangent. Tangent. You literally just went on a tangent. I let you go on a tangent. I know it's your show, but let me respond. Let me respond.
- [42:39]
Mike Pesca
I'm letting you respond. That's what I'm begging.
- [42:41]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I know, but I had to stop. I had to stop you for a second because you were about to chime in there, sir, my friend. So, first of all, as a big tent party, the important part about the big tent party is to include everyone. Migrants, right? Immigrants, LGBTQ community, poor people, middle class people. It is important, as a. Just a humanitarian thing, to not let vulnerable communities who are under attack continue to be under attack. That is just the right thing to do. That is the right thing to do, and that is what makes us. And what makes the Democratic Party a really. A party for everyone. That's it. That is. That. That is just the number one. Just the basics. Just the basics. Now, if we had 2024, if we had one 2024, you know, would we be in a better place? Obviously, we'd be in a better place. That's just an obvious yes answer. But the question is, really is. So many things are played into what happened in 2024. It is not just one thing. It is the political climate that we're in. It is how it is what is happening right now in this country. Right? And it's also the global. The global patterns that we saw. Every G7 country, every G10 country who was an incumbent lost Covid after Covid. The economy was a huge, major problem. Even though we were turning the economy around, people weren't feeling it there. There's so many things that occurred. And I talk about. I talk about, you know, having a woman of color and a woman at the Top of the ticket and how people were feeling. There are so many things here that played into a loss. So many things here. And now we fast forward to where we are today. I mean, Donald Trump won. And what he represents tells you what people voted for, what he represents tells you what people voted for. Because we saw what he did in his first term, and clearly people wanted more of that. So now we're in a situation where Democrats have to respond to this moment. And we are seeing a moment that we've never seen before, not even in his first term, even Donald Trump's first term. This moment. We've never seen the chaos. The first term was a cultural war, right? It was very much a cultural war. Now it is chaos with a playbook, a very strategic playbook that they are unleashing on the most vulnerable among us. That is what's happening, and they're being effective. And if we're not honest about that, then we're not honest about the moment that we're in. We have military in cities rounding up, not rounding up, Americans. That's what's happening. That's not okay. That is not okay. And we should not be okay with that. People are questioning our democracy. They're skeptical of our democracy, and I don't blame them. And it is understood in order to have a democracy, you have to fight. Fight for it every day. You have to fight for it every day. And so the moment that we're in, it cannot be as business as usual. It cannot. That's why I'm talking about the opposition party. That's why I'm. I wrote this book. I am fearful for the people that I care about, the people that I love, the communities that I represent. And I am a private citizen, and I have every right as a private citizen to share my thoughts and to share how I see, as someone who was also in the public sector for 15 years, how to move forward. And I lay that very clearly in my book. I really do. And I truly hope people take an opportunity to read the book and to listen, or listen to the book, however you choose. And just give. Give me a listen. Give me a listen. I have to go. I have to go to another. Another.
- [47:02]
Mike Pesca
Oh, that's it. So I let you talk for five minutes, and I can't even. I'll ask you.
- [47:07]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I mean, you spoke. You spoke for a few minutes. I really.
- [47:10]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, it is my show. I don't understand. Okay. I'll ask a question, and you could say I'm walking out or not. And here. This could be my last question. I don't understand. What?
- [47:19]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I didn't hear you. What did you say?
- [47:20]
Mike Pesca
I'm going to ask my last question and you could walk out or not. I don't understand.
- [47:25]
Karine Jean-Pierre
I mean, it's not even that we agree. We agreed to a certain amount of time.
- [47:29]
Mike Pesca
There was nothing tangible. I was really interested in what you wanted to say. If you don't think. If you think you gave terse, understandable answers for the time. Yeah.
- [47:38]
Karine Jean-Pierre
Thank you for the time. Thank you for the time.
- [47:40]
Mike Pesca
I'll just put this out there. I can't see how any one of my listeners could hear this and say, I understand what she's talking about, except we're in a terrible situation. That's it for today's show. Corey Warr is the producer of the gist. Jeff Craig runs our Social. Kathleen Sykes helps me on the GIST list very much. And Michelle Pesca helps us all so very much. See the error of our ways and the wisdom of our future. And thanks for listening.
- [48:30]
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- [49:03]
Mike Pesca
What do we do with you? You can't go in the recycling bin, but you can be recycled if taken to a new recycle on center. Find one near you@recycleon.org OregonCenters.