Washington journalists paint a damning picture of a declining president surrounded by insiders insisting he’s fit for office.
The debate was supposed to save his campaign. All through 2023 the Democratic Party’s pollsters warned that voters in key swing states thought that Joe Biden was simply too old to serve a second term. They were drifting towards Donald Trump. There were increasing calls for him to stand down. Some came from the media; this was classified as right-wing disinformation, and the White House conducted ferocious attack campaigns against journalists who reported on the president’s fitness for office.
But the calls also came from inside the Democratic Party: politicians, donors, operatives who met with him and witnessed his decline. His movements were slow, stiff, hobbling, his voice a trembling whisper, his attention drifting into what seemed like catatonia. They’d known him for decades but he failed to remember them. He didn’t recognise George Clooney, one of his most dedicated and successful fundraisers, one of the most famous men in the world.
Biden couldn’t run again. Hadn’t he pledged back in 2020 to serve as “the bridge”, paving the way to a new generation of Democratic leaders? But the tight circle of aides and family members around the president warned that making such statements – even in private – was the height of disloyalty, and would not go unpunished. Besides, who else could stand?
The most likely replacement was vice-president Kamala Harris, awkward, unpopular, considered a lightweight by the White House. If Biden’s polling was bad, Kamala’s was worse. Donald Trump was an existential threat to democracy, and only Biden could defeat him. The first presidential debate was an opportunity to display his vigour, his quick wit, to dismiss all those concerns about age by proving that he could still lead the nation. Biden himself felt that Trump was so stupid, so obviously dishonest, that when voters saw them side by side the comparison would remove all doubt.
CNN journalist Jake Tapper co-hosted the debate that ended Biden’s career; his co-writer of Original Sin, Alex Thompson, is a journalist at the news website Axios who has covered the White House for years. Their book documents the elaborate cover-up to conceal Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, and the catastrophic failure of this conspiracy, which – more than anything else – restored Donald Trump to power.
Their sources suggest that Biden’s deterioration began in 2015; it was his last year as Barack Obama’s vice-president, the year his son and presumptive heir Beau Biden died of cancer. When he ran in 2020 it was the year of Covid. His team were able to limit his number of appearances, restrict access, support him with notecards, teleprompters, keep meetings short, selectively edit video footage to conceal his decline.
For much of his presidency, the US was run by a small cabal of advisers who hoped to continue this arrangement into a second term. “He just had to win,” one of his former aides explained. “And then he could disappear for four years – he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” When asked how they could justify subverting democracy like this, the aide replied, “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them, too.”
The debate took place on June 27, four months before the election. Afterwards, Biden’s advisers and his wife Jill insisted that the president had finished strong. By the end of the 90 minutes he was clear and cogent. He had a bad cold, is all. He stuttered a little but he always had. And what about Trump? He stood up there and told one barefaced lie after another. Why didn’t the media report on that? Biden did have a cold and Donald Trump lied, but both facts were rendered irrelevant by the long moments near the beginning where Biden’s sentences repeatedly drifted into nonsense, or he simply stared slack-jawed into the camera.
Original Sin understands something subtle about politics: the people who ran the Biden administration were liars. They were perpetuating an elaborate and unforgivable cover-up, but at the same time they understood themselves to be decent, honest people, certainly compared with their adversaries. This cognitive dissonance compelled them to believe their own fabrications, to convince themselves that Biden was a strong and capable president even as they both concealed his condition from the rest of the world and kept impossibly bleak polling data from the president.
They made profoundly consequential decisions as if the lies they’d told were true. For weeks after the debate they tried to stare down their own party, issuing threats, citing surveys that didn’t exist. A CBS poll found that 72% of voters did not think he should run or serve. He was running, they replied. And he would win. End of conversation.
In 2020, Biden had promised to pick a black woman for his vice-presidential candidate. His team settled on Harris, a junior senator from California. She played a peripheral role in his administration, but remained loyal to him during the fight in 2024.
When Biden finally withdrew after weeks of brutal infighting, both inside the party and in the public arena, he handed the nomination to Harris. She had little national campaign experience and inherited a shattered operation, with only three months to turn it around.
It was an impossible task. Trump won a decisive victory, and a few weeks later, Joe Biden went on TV and declared that he would have won.
A day before Original Sin was released in the US, Joe Biden’s office announced he’d been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
ORIGINAL SIN: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Hutchinson Heinemann, $40), is out now.
