In the summer of 1973, in the thick of Watergate, Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee posed a memorable question about Richard Nixon: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” The answer turned out to be, to put it charitably, quite a lot and early on.
After every presidential election, journalists rush to write books on the campaign that was — covering primaries and conventions, voters and polls, strategies and infighting. But books about the 2024 race also prompt a new variation on Baker’s question: What did the Democrats know about Joe Biden’s physical and mental decline, and when did they know it? And, if historical appropriation permits a corollary: Once they knew, why didn’t more of them speak out about it?
The answer to the first question, once again, appears to be quite a lot and early on. The answer to the second is more complicated, involving a mix of denial, partisanship, political calculation and the peculiar blindness that results from family lore and political mythology. The result is a unique category of campaign book, about the race that was until it suddenly wasn’t — and about a political party eager to find a scapegoat, in the form of one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., for its electoral troubles.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin” is already the big political book of the moment, even before its formal May 20 publication. (For a summary, see the subtitle: “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”) The authors depict a Democratic Party, a White House staff and a Biden campaign that, though aware to varying degrees of the weakness, forgetfulness, confusion and incoherence afflicting Biden, remained largely silent about it, opting instead to accommodate and rationalize. And they describe a president and inner circle so enamored with the Biden mythology — defiant against tough odds, resilient against adversity, solely capable of vanquishing Donald Trump — that any skepticism was forbidden.
In an authors’ note, Tapper and Thompson highlight the book’s 200 sources — lots of lawmakers and campaign and administration insiders — most of whom agreed to talk to them only after the election. “Some spoke to us with regret that they hadn’t done more, or that they had waited so long,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Many were angry and felt deeply betrayed, not just by Biden but by his inner circle of advisers, his allies and his family.” In campaign books, guilt, blame and not-my-fault-ism are standard impulses of the losing side.
“Original Sin” is not definitive on when Biden’s diminishment began, except to say that signs were frequent and spanned several years, often seeming to worsen around periods of family turmoil. For some, it started in earnest in 2015, with the passing of the president’s eldest son. “Beau’s death wrecked him,” one senior White House aide tells the authors. “Part of him died that never came back after Beau died.” The later legal troubles surrounding Biden’s son Hunter — particularly the collapse of a 2023 deal on tax and gun charges — also proved an “inflection point,” Tapper and Thompson write, citing Biden aides, “where the president suddenly and steeply declined.”
Instances of Biden’s decline make up big chunks of “Original Sin.” In 2019, during a bus tour in Iowa, Biden struggled to remember the name of Mike Donilon, a campaign strategist and White House adviser who had worked with him for nearly four decades. In March 2020, Biden forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing.”) One day in the White House in 2022, he could not summon the names of his national security adviser (Jake Sullivan, whom he called Steve) and his communications director (Kate Bedingfield, whom he called Press), both of whom were standing near him. And at a Hollywood fund-raiser in 2024, Biden did not recognize George Clooney — among the more recognizable faces on the planet — and had to be reminded who he was.
These are just a few of the copious examples Tapper and Thompson report, all in advance of Biden’s halting and confused performance in his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024. “What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly,” Tapper and Thompson write. “It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired.”
The authors call out a close circle of top Biden aides — Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, among others — for insisting either that the president was fine or that his health was not a major problem. When Biden was running in 2019 and 2020, senior aides treated his age “as simply a political vulnerability, not a serious limitation on his abilities,” Tapper and Thompson write. Four years later, they told themselves that even a reduced Biden would be better than a Trump redux. “Biden, his family and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” the authors write.
Anyone questioning or even inquiring about Biden’s physical or mental competence faced intense pushback from the White House. When a reporter from a national news outlet began asking about the president’s forgetfulness and confusion, Ricchetti, who served as a counselor to Biden, called her and said the story was false, and that he knew because he was in constant meetings with the president. The reporter, whom the authors do not identify, inferred that if she pursued the story she’d be branded a liar. (“The tacit threat worked,” Tapper and Thompson write.) And when David Axelrod, a former strategist for Barack Obama, publicly raised Biden’s age as a liability, he got an irate phone call from Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. “Who’s going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it. You better have a lot of certainty about a different candidate before you say the president should step aside. The future of the country depends on it!”
It’s a tortured logic — stick with a flawed and deteriorating candidate precisely because his victory is essential — but it made sense if you assumed that the shortcomings of Biden’s opponent, not of Biden himself, would prove decisive. “Biden had the mind-set that what Trump was saying was so outrageous and so stupid that if the American people saw them side by side they would realize Trump was unfit,” Tapper and Thompson write. What Biden and his team did not seem to grasp was that the campaign was becoming a referendum on Biden alone, and two numbers — the price of groceries and the age of the candidate — were both moving in the wrong direction.
When the American people considered the two men side by side, it was Biden who looked increasingly unable to handle the job.
Tapper and Thompson chronicle many ways in which the Biden campaign and the White House masked the president’s condition, even as the signs were becoming clearer. These are some of the most compelling portions of their story, showing how efforts at concealment are not necessarily planned out; sometimes they just happen. For example, White House speechwriters began to simplify the texts they prepared for the president. “Everything got shorter: speeches, paragraphs, even sentences,” Tapper and Thompson report. “The vocabulary shrank.” This was not some mandate from on high; the speechwriters “were also slowly adapting to Biden’s diminished capabilities.”
Biden began relying more on teleprompters and note cards even for simple gatherings. Members of his cabinet recall meetings that were “terrible” and “uncomfortable” and “so scripted,” even early in his term. “It was like talking to your grandpa,” said a former leader of a European country who saw Biden in 2021. And during a trip with the president in 2022, one Biden cabinet member dismissed the possibility of re-election while chatting with another member: “There’s just no way. He’s too old.”
The power of “Original Sin” is its relentless marshaling of such insider scenes — the admissions, regrets and recriminations within the White House and the campaign — as the president continued to falter. In “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,” published last month, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes offer a complementary emphasis, moving beyond what happened and focusing on why.
To Allen and Parnes, who also co-wrote books about the 2016 and 2020 presidential races, Biden’s motives for staying in the race as long as he did were more self-serving. They quote Donilon speaking to a prominent Democrat: “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” The authors point to Jill Biden, who in 2004 had discouraged her husband from running but now struggled to let go. “After eight years as the second lady and nearly two more as the first lady, the trappings of the most elite levels of Washington power had grown on her,” Allen and Parnes write.
In the eyes of some Democrats, hiding the truth about a diminished Biden became a self-fulfilling political necessity. After the Trump-Biden debate, some Biden allies began to wonder not only whether he should continue in the race but also whether he was even fit to carry on as president. “But if Democratic officials spoke of the latter publicly, if they told voters the sitting president was in no shape to run the country, they would surely forfeit any chance at winning in November, whether it was Biden or another Democrat at the top of the ticket,” Allen and Parnes write.
It’s more tortured logic — if we admit that we can’t run the country, they won’t let us run the country! — and shows how the imperatives of partisanship can put a nation at risk. (In a sign of how entrenched the mistrust of the Democrats has become on this issue, even Biden’s Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis, announced on Sunday, has elicited questions about when the president first learned of his disease.)
In “Original Sin” Donilon emerges as a principal villain; in “Fight” it is Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, who served as chair of the Biden campaign (and later the Harris campaign) and who “enraged” Democratic donors following Biden’s fateful debate, Allen and Parnes write, dodging questions about the president’s mental competence and about possible alternatives should he depart.
After the debate, the Biden family offered conflicting excuses, arguing that advisers had left the president “unprepared” for the event, but also that “overpreparation” was Biden’s problem, that “his team had filled his head with so many facts, figures and scripted lines that he couldn’t process everything in real time,” Allen and Parnes write. (Tapper and Thompson offer a simpler explanation: Biden took lots of naps during the days he’d blocked out for debate prep.)
Late in the campaign, as the president pondered whether to stay in the race, Donilon continued to tell him that the polling remained tight, that Biden was still competitive, even when the campaign’s pollsters disagreed. Tapper and Thompson report that multiple Democrats, including Obama, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Chuck Schumer, worried that Biden was not getting good information from his campaign regarding the public’s concerns over his performance. Pollsters complained that they delivered their data to Donilon, who would put his own positive spin on it when sharing it with Biden. When Schumer told Biden in mid-July that the president’s own pollsters believed he only had a 5 percent chance of winning, Biden had a one-word response. “Really?”
It’s one of the most damning moments I found in these books: Not only did Democrats keep the public in the dark about Biden, they also kept Biden in the dark about the public.
There was a final argument Democrats used for keeping Biden in the race, an odd one considering whom Biden would later endorse as his replacement. The Democrats had to ride or die with Biden, his allies contended, because his second-in-command, Kamala Harris, just wasn’t up to the job. “Biden’s advisers did not fully trust her,” Tapper and Thompson write, considering her too cautious, reluctant to take on politically tough assignments and overcomplicating simple ones. (Ahead of a Washington dinner party with journalists and socialites, the authors report, Harris aides were so anxious that they held a mock party with members of her staff playing the role of the guests.)
So Biden’s allies talked Harris down to skittish donors and party luminaries such as Nancy Pelosi and Obama quietly expressed misgivings about the vice president, preferring an open process to sort out the top of the ticket. According to Allen and Parnes, Obama imagined pairing Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan for president and Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland for vice president, “a combination that would still allow Democrats to rally around a woman and a person of color.”
Biden’s enduring resentments against Obama — for preferring Hillary Clinton in 2016, for not endorsing him in the 2020 primaries — may explain in part why Biden supported Harris as his replacement. Yes, party unity in coalescing around a Black female vice president was a factor, but the “most satisfying” part of Biden’s choice was that it would undercut his old boss, Allen and Parnes write. “At that moment, you have very few things you control, and that’s the one thing he had control over, and he chose to stick it to Obama,” a person close to both men told the authors.
On such pettiness are tickets chosen and history upended.
Biden had once imagined himself a “bridge” to a new generation of Democratic leadership. As Allen and Parnes put it, “in the end, Biden was, in fact, a bridge — from one Trump term to the next.”
This is an assumption, implicit or explicit, underlying these books: that by waiting too long to leave the race, or by seeking a second term at all, Biden “delivered the election directly into Trump’s hands,” as Tapper and Thompson put it.
But if Biden had exited stage left earlier, would the Democrats necessarily have retained the White House? It’s not hard to imagine the party somehow ripping itself apart in a rapid-fire primary. Any Democratic nominee might have struggled mightily under the weight of Biden’s record on inflation, the border and Afghanistan. Perhaps the anti-incumbent forces across the globe would still have overpowered the Democrats, no matter if Biden or Harris or Whitmer or Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom or Insert Fantasy Democrat Here had been the nominee.
“We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” says David Plouffe, who managed Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign and advised Harris’s race last year, in “Original Sin.” Maybe. But blaming Biden for everything is too simple — Trump does much the same for whatever goes wrong in his second term — and lets the rest of the party off too easily.
For too long now, the Democrats have identified mainly as the anti-Trump party, proclaiming what they are against more than explaining what they’re for. Primary campaigns typically provide the chance for key policy debates and ideological self-definition, but the Democrats seem disinclined to see such a process through.
In 2020, Biden hardly represented the new ideas, energy or future of his party; he lost big in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada before resurrecting his campaign in South Carolina. But he won the nomination because party leaders coalesced, in desperation, around someone they thought could beat Trump. He was Uncle Joe, reliable and familiar and not a curmudgeonly socialist from Vermont. Four years later, when Biden gave up on dreams of re-election, his party again missed the chance to clarify where it stood, simply handing the baton to the closest outstretched hand.
“She had not spent the previous four years doing the reps, engaging in tough interviews and mixing it up with voters who might be inclined to view a fancy San Franciscan skeptically,” Tapper and Thompson write of Harris. “She never did the work of erasing the far-left positions she’d taken to win the nomination in 2020.” As Allen and Parnes put it, Harris lacked “a core cause for her candidacy.”
Instead, her campaign was all about the risks Trump posed: “We’re not going back.”
Americans now know what it’s like to go back to a Trump administration — but it’s less obvious what they make of his Democratic opposition. Biden’s victory in 2020 allowed the Democrats to paper over their differences, and his implosion in 2024 lets them do it once again. After all, it’s easier to find a scapegoat than an identity. But self-definition is a critical challenge for a party that must offer something more than fervent anti-Trumpism, however crucial resistance feels today.
The vital question Biden’s party faces is not about the former president. What must the Democrats know about themselves, and when will they know it?
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Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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