ORIGINAL SIN: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
In Christian theology, original sin begins with Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. But Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” chronicles a different fall from grace. The cover image is a black-and-white portrait of Joe Biden with a pair of hands clamped over his eyes. The biblical story is about the danger of innocent curiosity; the story in this new book is about the danger of willful ignorance.
“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment,” Tapper and Thompson write. On the evening of June 27, 2024, Democratic voters watched the first presidential debate in amazement and horror: A red-faced Donald Trump let loose a barrage of audacious whoppers while Biden, slack-jawed and pale, struggled to string together intelligible rebuttals.
Trump’s debate performance was of a piece with his rallies, a jumble of nonsensical digressions and wild claims. But for many Americans, the extent of Biden’s frailty came as a shock. Most of the president’s appearances had, by then, become tightly controlled affairs. For at least a year and a half, Biden’s aides had been scrambling to accommodate an octogenarian president who was becoming increasingly exhausted and confused. According to “Original Sin,” which makes pointed use of the word “cover-up” in the subtitle, alarmed donors and pols who sought the lowdown on Biden’s cognitive state were kept in the dark. Others had daily evidence of Biden’s decline but didn’t want to believe it.
Tapper is an anchor for CNN (and also served as a moderator for the presidential debate); Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios. In an authors’ note, they explain that they interviewed approximately 200 people, including high-level insiders, “some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages.”
The result is a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term. The authors trace the deluge of trouble that flowed from Biden’s original sin: the sidelining of Vice President Kamala Harris; the attacks on journalists (like Thompson) who deigned to report on worries about Biden’s apparent fatigue and mental state; an American public lacking clear communication from the president and left to twist in the wind. “It was an abomination,” one source told the authors. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”
This blistering charge is attributed to “a prominent Democratic strategist” who also “publicly defended Biden.” In “Original Sin,” the reasons given for saying nice things in public about the president are legion. Some Democrats, especially those who didn’t see the president that often, relied on his surrogates for reassurance about his condition (“He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine”); others were wary of giving ammunition to the Trump campaign, warning that he was an existential threat to the country. Tapper and Thompson are scornful of such rationales: “For those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.”
Biden announced that he would be running for re-election in April 2023; he had turned 80 the previous November and was already the oldest president in history. Over his long life, he had been through a lot: the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972; two aneurysm surgeries in 1988; the death of his son Beau in 2015; the seemingly endless trouble kicked up by his son Hunter, a recovering addict whose legal troubles included being under investigation by the Justice Department.
Yet Biden always bounced back. The fact that he defied the naysayers and beat the odds to win the 2020 election was, for him and his close circle of family and advisers, a sign that he was special — and persistently underestimated. They maintained “a near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again,” the authors write. “And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.”
In 2019, when Biden announced a presidential run, he was 76. It was still a time when “Good Biden was far more present than Old Biden.” By 2023, the authors suggest, that ratio had reversed. Some of his decline was hard to distinguish from what they call “the Bidenness,” which included his longtime reputation for gaffes, meandering stories and a habit of forgetting staffers’ names.
But people who didn’t see Biden on a daily basis were increasingly taken aback when they finally laid eyes on him. They would remark on how his once booming voice had become a whisper, how his confident stride had become a shuffle. An aghast congressman recalls being reminded of his father, who had Alzheimer’s; another thought of his father, too, who died of Parkinson’s.
The people closest to Biden landed on some techniques to handle (or disguise) what was happening: restricting urgent business to the hours between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.; instructing his writers to keep his speeches brief so that he didn’t have to spend too much time on his feet; having him use the short stairs to Air Force One. When making videos, his aides sometimes filmed “in slow motion to blur the reality of how slowly he actually walked.” By late 2023, his staff was pushing as much of his schedule as they could to midday.
When White House aides weren’t practicing fastidious stage management, they seemed to be sticking their heads in the sand. According to a forthcoming book by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, Biden’s aides decided against his taking a cognitive test in early 2024. Tapper and Thompson quote a physician who served as a consultant to the White House Medical Unit for the last four administrations and expressed his dismay at the idea of withholding such information: “If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose.”
Just how much of this rigmarole was desperate rationalization versus deliberate scheming is never entirely clear. Tapper and Thompson identify two main groups that closed ranks around Biden: his family and a group of close aides known internally as “the Politburo” that included his longtime strategist Mike Donilon and his counselor Steve Ricchetti. The family encouraged Biden’s view of himself as a historic figure. The Politburo was too politically hard-nosed for that. Instead, its members pointed to Biden’s record in office and the competent people around him. The napping, the whispering, the shuffling — all that stuff had merely to do with the “performative” parts of the job.
Tapper and Thompson vehemently disagree. They offer a gracious portrait of Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified materials and in his February 2024 report famously described the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden and his team were incensed and tried “to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack,” but the authors defend his notorious line. They emphasize that it is incumbent upon a special counsel to spell out how the subject of an investigation would probably appear to a jury — and that what Hur wrote about Biden was true.
Of course, in an election like 2024, when the differences between the candidates are so stark and the stakes are so high, nearly every scrap of information gets viewed through the lens of “Will it help my team win?” Even competently administered policy could not compensate for a woeful inability to communicate with the American people. In a democracy, this is a tragedy — especially if you believe, as Biden did, that a second Trump term would put the very existence of that democracy in peril.
Earlier this month, in what looks like an attempt to get ahead of the book’s publication, Biden went on “The View” to say that he accepts some responsibility for Trump’s victory: “I was in charge.” But he was dismissive about reports of any cognitive decline. In “Original Sin,” Tapper and Thompson describe him waking up the morning after the 2024 election thinking that if only he had stayed in the race, he would have won. “That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again,” the authors write. There was just one problem with his reasoning: “His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.”
ORIGINAL SIN: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again | By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson | Penguin Press | 332 pp. | $32
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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