It was the night of June 27, 2024, and Lindy Li could feel her whole body shaking. She wasn’t sure if it was intense hunger after a stressful day with no food, or the shock of seeing one of her heroes crumble in front of the entire nation.

The 81-year-old President, Joe Biden, had just put in a devastatingly shambolic debate performance against Donald Trump – the moment his attempt at a second presidential term tanked. Li, a prolific Democratic Party fundraiser, claims to have been one of the first people with whom he spoke on his arrival at the location where party loyalists had been watching the president’s dismal showing on big screen TVs.

‘I was shaking… like, I cannot believe this happened. I knew he was slowing down, that’s no secret, but I didn’t know he was going to face plant,’ Li told the Daily Mail. ‘I didn’t know it was going to be an outright collapse. It was just embarrassing [and] painful to watch.’

As an avowed Democratic Party insider, Li, 35, had a front row seat to the implosion of Biden’s campaign for re-election and the subsequent ascension of his Vice President Kamala Harris to the ticket, only for her to suffer a crushing defeat to Donald Trump.

Speaking to the President afterwards, she felt sorrow at the diminished figure before her. ‘I had so much compassion for him, I didn’t mention the debate — I consoled him,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘[I felt] love and pity – actual pity – and that is not the feeling you want to have for your President.’

Now, when Li thinks back on what she recalls as an excruciating time, her overwhelming feeling is not compassion and sadness, but anger and guilt about all her friends and contacts who opened their wallets and gave her millions of dollars for what she claims the Democrats always knew was a losing cause.

As she exposes in her new book – Unburdened: A Former Democratic Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse, out on Tuesday – the former Liberal fundraiser not only lost faith in her party but switched sides entirely. So disenchanted was she by the millions she claims she saw squandered in behind-the-scenes excesses, the ‘cult’-like mentality she alleges was fostered and the Biden family’s and closest advisors’ seeming desperation to cling to power.

She writes that Biden was ‘shamelessness in human form,’ while Harris is dismissed as the ‘Cackle Queen.’

Lindy Li, a prolific Democratic Party fundraiser, claims to have been one of the first people President Joe Biden spoke with after his disastrous debate in 2024

‘I consoled him,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘[I felt] love and pity – actual pity – and that is not the feeling you want to have for your President’

Li had a front row seat to the implosion of Biden’s campaign for re-election and the subsequent ascension of his Vice President Kamala Harris to the ticket

The former Liberal fundraiser not only lost faith in her party but switched sides entirely

But perhaps what bites the most is the extent to which she feels she played a part in the deception she said she witnessed behind closed doors: ‘[People] were donating to the campaign because of their faith in me, and that propelled my need for accountability afterwards, because I felt like it was a personal betrayal.’

Today, Li doesn’t hold back on the blame. Some of the most shocking claims in her book relate to what she alleges Democrats – and specifically Harris – spent in donor money on fripperies such as the Vice President’s hairstyle, celebrity endorsers and frivolous gift baskets.

Breaking the code of loyalty and openly criticizing the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the November 2024 election defeat, Li switched her allegiance to the Republican Party in December 2024.

Li has earned herself plenty of enemies for such a polarizing move, but she feels like her life has toughened her to the blows she has faced in the past year.

Li was born in China, but when she was two weeks old her parents left her with her grandmother to move to Sheffield, England. She joined them when she was three years old in 1994, spending two years in the UK before relocating again to the United States.

After moving around for her father’s job in academia, they settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when Li was nine. Her father transitioned into real estate, making good money and catapulting the family into the upper echelons of Philadelphia society.

‘I went to college with billionaires,’ she said. ‘That’s just my life.’

Despite parents who Li said ‘very much wanted me to be a traditional East Asian wife,’ she was instead drawn to politics. She studied philosophy at Princeton where she was class President for each of her four years at the university.

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, the Daily Mail 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 the Daily Mail. ‘That’s my money that they’re just blowing on trinkets. Why are you preaching to the converted?’

The Daily Mail 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.’