It’s hard to sell people on your vision for the future if you can’t break from the past. A parade of damning revelations about Joe Biden’s decline—which have leaked from a new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson into media reports—have shined an unflattering light once again on the Democratic Party: Did its leaders and members really not know how much he’d deteriorated toward the end of his presidency until that infamous debate with Donald Trump? And did they help to conceal Biden’s senescence from the public?
Faced with these uncomfortable but important questions, top Democrats have deflected, sounding a little too much like Republicans contorting themselves to avoid talking about the latest indefensible Trump outrage. “We’re looking forward,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on CNN Tuesday, refusing to budge from talking points about the reconciliation bill the GOP majority is working to pass. Asked by CNN’s Manu Raju about a more specific anecdote from the book—that Biden appeared not to recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser the actor and Democratic activist was throwing him last June, the same month Schumer had described the president as being “in command and impressive”—the minority leader repeated himself: “We’re just looking forward.”
Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, had a similar answer when he was asked about Tapper and Thompson’s reporting on Tuesday: “We’re not looking backward,” the New York Democrat told reporters. “We’re looking forward at this particular moment.”
It’s understandable why they’d want to. Details from Original Sin by Tapper and Thompson, which comes out next week, have painted a deeply troubling portrait not only of a man becoming increasingly unfit for the most powerful office in the country, but of an inner circle that sought to cover it up. Not only did Biden reportedly not recognize Clooney, whom he’s known for years; Tapper and Thompson report that he also forgot or confused the names of administration officials and close aides like Mike Donilon, who’d worked with him for decades. And it wasn’t only his cognitive decline, which reportedly disturbed some Democrats who hadn’t seen him recently; he was becoming so physically frail that aides had discussed the possibility he might need to use a wheelchair in his second term.
Biden, meanwhile, recently launched a reputation rehabilitation campaign amid renewed criticisms of his decision to seek a second term and help doom the country to another four years of Trump. But it is also a stain on the party that indulged his hubris and insisted, to a public that continually expressed concern about Biden’s age, that everything was fine—that those worried about his capacity, even after flailing on the debate stage, were maybe even “bed wetters.” Democrats were warning—correctly—that Trump was an authoritarian disaster waiting to happen, with the blind support of Republican lawmakers. And here they were, the people who were supposed to be the adults in the room, asking their base to ignore their eyes and ears and support a man who was also unqualified for the job, albeit for entirely different reasons.
When I talk to Democrats about what went wrong in 2024, they often speak of problems with the party’s “brand” or “messaging.” But the problem goes deeper than not being online enough or getting distracted from kitchen table issues—it’s that, in dismissing legitimate concerns about Biden’s capacity to serve, they undermined their credibility with the broader electorate and fostered disillusionment among their own base. Biden’s misguided reelection bid not only left Kamala Harris too little time to mount a successful run of her own; it also left her in the shaky position of having to either admit her boss may not up to the job he held and had sought to keep another four years, or to claim, as his second-in-command, that she had seen no signs of his decline. She chose the latter: “You never saw anything like what happened at the debate night behind closed doors with him?” she was asked by NBC News’ Hallie Jackson in the final weeks of the campaign. “It was a bad debate,” Harris replied. “People have bad debates.”
There’s a lesson there for aspiring party leaders like JB Pritzker and Pete Buttigieg, who have tried to tread carefully around the Biden revelations: As uncomfortable and politically risky as it might be to face up to Democrats’ Biden fiasco, there is more to be gained politically, in confronting it head on than in hoping the public forgets. Biden “totally fucked us,” as Harris campaign aide David Plouffe told Tapper and Thompson in the book. And if Democrats don’t break from him, he could continue to do so.
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
-
What Scarlett Johansson Wants
-
Rita Hayworth’s Heartbreaking Vanishing Act
-
The Nuances of Casey Means’s Medical Exit and Antiestablishment Origins
-
Why Buckingham Palace Tried to Stop a Photo of Princess Diana and David Bowie
-
How an Orgasmic Meditation Group Sparked a Troubled Federal Case
-
Molly Jong-Fast Reflects on Her Mother’s Dementia and the Fleeting Nature of Fame
-
Deconstructing Trump’s Elaborate Oval Office Makeover
-
All of Quentin Tarantino’s Movies Ranked
-
Elon Musk’s 14 Children and Their Mothers (That We Know Of)
-
From the Archive: Princess Margaret’s Not So Happily-Ever-After
The post Democrats Can’t Ignore Damning New Details About Joe Biden’s Decline appeared first on Vanity Fair.
