On the evening of June 27, 2024, Lindy Li felt herself trembling. She could not tell whether the shaking came from going hungry after an exhausting day or from watching one of her political heroes unravel before millions of viewers.
President Joe Biden, then 81, had delivered a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, effectively derailing his bid for a second term. Li, a prominent Democratic fundraiser, says she was among the first people Biden spoke to when he arrived at the venue where party supporters had gathered to watch the debate on large screens.
‘I was shaking… I thought, I cannot believe this happened. I knew he was slowing down — that was not a secret — but I never expected him to completely face-plant,’ Li told Our News Outlet. ‘I did not realize it would become an outright collapse. It was embarrassing and painful to watch.’
At 35, Li was a well-connected Democratic insider with a close view of Biden’s failed re-election campaign, the fallout from his debate performance and Vice President Kamala Harris’s rapid rise as the party’s replacement nominee. Harris would ultimately suffer a decisive defeat to Trump.
When Li spoke with Biden afterward, she said she was struck by how diminished he appeared. ‘I felt enormous compassion for him, so I did not bring up the debate. I consoled him,’ she told Our News Outlet. ‘[There was] love and pity — genuine pity — and that is not the emotion you want to feel toward your president.’
Looking back on that painful period, however, Li says her strongest emotions are now anger and guilt. She is especially troubled by the friends and political contacts who donated millions of dollars through her, money she claims was raised for a campaign Democrats already understood was unlikely to succeed.
In her new book, Unburdened: A Former Democratic Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse, released Tuesday, Li describes how she lost confidence in the Democratic Party and eventually changed her allegiance. She says her disillusionment grew after witnessing what she portrays as lavish backstage spending, a party culture with ‘cult’-like qualities and a determined effort by Biden’s family and closest advisers to remain in power.
In the book, Li calls Biden ‘shamelessness in human form’ and gives Harris the unflattering nickname ‘Cackle Queen.’
Lindy Li, a prominent Democratic fundraiser, says she was among the first people President Joe Biden spoke with following his disastrous 2024 debate performance
‘I consoled him,’ Li told Our News Outlet. ‘[There was] love and pity — genuine pity — and that is not the emotion you want to feel toward your president’
Li had a close view of Biden’s failed re-election campaign and Vice President Kamala Harris’s subsequent elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket
The former Democratic fundraiser says she lost faith in her party and ultimately switched political sides
What troubles her most, Li says, is the possibility that she helped sustain the deception she believes was taking place behind closed doors. ‘[People] donated because they trusted me, and that made me feel personally betrayed,’ she said. ‘It also created a responsibility to demand answers afterward.’
Li now directs much of her criticism at the way she says Democratic leaders, particularly Harris, used donor funds. Among the claims in her book are allegations that campaign money went toward indulgences including the vice president’s hair styling, celebrity surrogates and extravagant gift baskets.
After openly breaking with the party following its November 2024 election defeat, Li formally joined the Republican Party in December of that year.
The decision has made Li a divisive figure and earned her numerous critics. Still, she says the challenges she has faced throughout her life have prepared her to withstand the backlash of the past year.
Li was born in China, but her parents moved to Sheffield, England, when she was just two weeks old, leaving her in the care of her grandmother. She joined them at age three in 1994, lived in Britain for two years and then moved with her family to the United States.
Her family relocated several times because of her father’s academic career before settling in Philadelphia when Li was nine. He later entered the real-estate business, earning enough to move the family into Philadelphia’s upper social circles.
‘I went to college alongside billionaires,’ Li said. ‘That is simply the life I grew up in.’
Although Li says her parents hoped she would become a conventional East Asian wife, she was drawn toward public life and politics. At Princeton, she studied philosophy and served as class president during all four years.
After graduation, she joined Morgan Stanley as a wealth manager but quit in 2015 at age 25 to run for Congress in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary.
Even though she describes herself as socially conservative, she was swept up in the optimism of the first Obama administration, and it was an automatic assumption among her liberal peers at college that she would join the Democrats.
‘I was told the other side consisted of Nazis, so it didn’t even compute,’ she said.
Her first attempt to run for office in 2016 failed when the signatures for her Pennsylvania candidacy were deemed invalid. Her opponent in the race had challenged her nominating petition, alleging she did not receive the required 1,000 signatures due to invalid signatures – the notary, Li said, had stamped but not signed them. She withdrew from the race.
‘I take full responsibility,’ she said at the time. ‘I understand it is my job to make sure that it’s done correctly.
‘I’ve learned my lesson and no one will be able to exploit my weaknesses in the future.’
And so, in 2018, she tried again. She came sixth in that primary, but she had caught the eye of the Democratic Party for other reasons: She had raised a large sum of money for a 27-year-old candidate with little political experience. Li claimed in media interviews that she raised $600,000 but the Federal Election Committee shows she received just over $168,000.
And so began Li’s ascent to the top tiers of Democratic fundraising. Working the phones, schmoozing her contacts in society and businesses and hosting extravagant soirees attended by top Democratic figures on the rooftop pool of her luxury apartment, Li threw herself into the task of getting Biden elected for a second term.
Li said she is angry that all her friends and contacts gave her millions of dollars for what she claims the Democrats always knew was a losing cause
Li switched her allegiance to the Republican Party in December 2024
Her first attempt to run for office in 2016 failed when the signatures for her Pennsylvania candidacy were deemed invalid
‘I wanted to lift him up, I loved him so much,’ she said.
That deep loyalty meant that she was among the many insiders who, she claims, initially put on their blinders as Biden’s frailty became clear during the second half of his Presidency.
But even as she appeared on TV and social media gushing about the president’s competence, she admitted, she was engulfed with a creeping sense that he was ill equipped to lead the nation for a second term.
She also bristled at her own treatment in the party claiming she was pigeonholed into Asian American lobbying groups that she felt little identification with. ‘The DNC imprisoned me in a racial silo against my will,’ she writes in Unburdened, recalling a Democratic National Convention event at which she was asked to attend alongside a dancing Chinese lion.
Li maintains in her tome that those close to Biden – including his wife Jill and his son Hunter – knew that he did not have the capacity to serve another term but were seduced by their proximity to power and did everything they could to hide his age-related decline.
Both Jill and Hunter have point blank rejected the suggestion they had any sense that Biden was unfit for office, though Jill said in her own memoir that, on seeing her husband’s disastrous debate performance she wondered whether he was ‘having a stroke,’ writing that she had, ‘never ever seen Joe like that before or since.’
‘The campaign had long since narrowed to a single, obsessive priority: Shielding the fragile ego of one aging leader rather than safeguarding the republic he swore to serve,’ Li writes.
While Li also confessed to keeping up the charade immediately after the debate, she appeared on Fox News on July 21, one month after the debate aftermath, saying it was ‘not my place to tell President Biden what to do but if he were to step aside, Vice President Kamala Harris would be an excellent candidate.’
Her timing was fortuitous: Later that same day, Biden announced that he was stepping down. Then came what Li sees as the second betrayal: the anointment of Harris to the Presidential ticket without any primary voting process.
Despite an initial swell of optimism, Li claimed that Democratic Party insiders knew Harris was a flawed candidate but rushed to anoint her anyway, given the lack of time until the election and the potential negative optics of overlooking a Black woman for the position. For her part, Li said, it took her only a week to raise $2 million for Harris, whereas it was a full year to bring in $1.1 million for Biden.
Still, she accused the party of ‘enthroning a deeply inadequate woman as the spearhead in their battle against Trump and exchanging a cognitively broken man for a cognitive mediocrity.’
Li claimed she was pressured into publicly praising Harris on television and on her social media accounts, as well as keeping the donor money flowing, only to see it squandered on concerts with celebrities, endless goody bags for donors and even, she claimed, $69,000 in styling. In fact, Our News Outlet obtained Harris’s campaign filings, which showed she spent $1 billion in her losing bid, including paying $69,000 to crew who worked on a Vogue magazine feature.
‘I would get care packages every three weeks, and I knew I was raising the money for it, which is the oddest thing,’ Li told Our News Outlet. ‘That’s my money that they’re just blowing on trinkets. Why are you preaching to the converted?’
Our News Outlet has reached out to representatives for Harris for comment.
In the months that followed, Li claimed there were conflicts of interest among top staff and a revolving door of White House staffers into consulting firms that receive the donor money. All the while, she attended a host of DNC events that she described as ‘a game of whack-a-celebrity, a bacchanal of self-congratulation and coastal elitism, the smell of uncut money wafting in the air.’
So, when the results came in on November 5, Li said she was devastated but not surprised. Soon after, she started appearing on the TV networks, discussing the flaws in the Harris campaign.
Li maintains in her new book that those close to Biden – including his wife Jill and his son Hunter – knew that he did not have the capacity to serve another term
After the Democrats lost the election, Li started appearing on the TV networks, discussing the flaws in the Harris campaign
Today, she describes herself as a ‘conservative-leaning independent’
Her friends in the Democratic Party, she claims, swiftly turned on her. Cast into the political wilderness, she finally found acceptance among the conservative pundits and podcasters.
Today, she describes herself as a ‘conservative-leaning independent.’ While critics allege she is an opportunist happy to do a complete ideological U-turn to be close to power, she insists she is motivated by a desire to fix the country.
Li does not define herself as a member of the MAGA movement despite fundraising Trump’s inauguration. She does not support the Iran war and still advocates for environmental protections and gun control.
‘I want to be one of the greatest voices in my generation to affect the things that I want to do to ensure, for example, that children aren’t getting slaughtered in classrooms and to make sure that everyone’s clean air and clean water,’ she said.
Despite her evisceration of the Democrats in her book, she believes that they are on track to trounce the Republicans at the midterms in November.
‘It’s my job to study the American people and how they feel,’ she said. ‘They are fuming right now. They are hurting, and I hurt with them.’
For now, Li has stepped back from fundraising, given the lack of a candidate she fully supports. But she is keen to remind the political establishment that she and her rolodex still exist, ready to spring into action.
‘I do whatever is right for our country, and I’m waiting for a candidate that I can totally support.
‘If I wanted to raise five million dollars I could. I know exactly who to call.’
