Joe Biden’s decline was obvious in the final months of his presidential campaign, but new and intimate accounts by his staffers reveal that the president’s inner circle conducted a cover-up of his faltering mental acuity as early as 2023.
Axios’s national political correspondent Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, doesn’t hit shelves until May 20. But some early glimpses at the book, published Tuesday by The Guardian, provide a more detailed picture of the chaos endemic to the end of Biden’s tenure.
“We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023,” one unidentified senior aide, who quit the White House in protest of Biden’s campaign, told Thompson and Tapper.
“I love Joe Biden. When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him,” the aide continued. “Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”
A Democratic strategist that spoke to the reporting duo was more blunt.
“It was an abomination,” the strategist said. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”
“Since at least 2022,” Biden struggled to maintain his trains of thought. He wavered on his top aides’ names. His speeches dragged.
“When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious,” The Guardian reported.
His regression summoned prominent Democrats to issue stern warnings. In a 2023 visit to the White House, former President Barack Obama reportedly cautioned Biden: “Just make sure you can win the race.” Days before Biden dropped out, then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told him that, should he usher in another Trump era due to his own hubris, he would “go down in American history as one of the darkest figures.”
“You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met,” Biden reportedly told Schumer as the senator left.
Power players on Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign team had searing reviews of the president’s performance.
“He totally fucked us,” David Plouffe told Thompson and Tapper. Plouffe was Obama’s 2008 campaign manager and had been tapped to help Harris’s 107-day-sprint to the White House, which he described as a “fucking nightmare.”
“It’s all Biden,” Plouffe said, remarking that Harris’s campaign had begun in a “deep hole” thanks to Biden’s insistence on staying in the race.
Tapper and Thompson interviewed some 200 individuals for the book, but none of their perspectives swayed Biden—then or now. Last week, while speaking with The View, the 82-year-old continued to refute allegations that he had and was experiencing symptoms of mental decline.
“They are wrong,” Biden said. “There is nothing to sustain that.”
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