Original Sin details the astonishing lengths to which the former president’s team went to conceal his deteriorating condition.
Original Sin details the astonishing lengths to which the former president’s team went to conceal his deteriorating condition.
A few days after President Joe Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with then-rival Donald Trump, Jill Biden traveled to western Michigan for a couple of campaign events with the swing state’s senior Democratic senator, Debbie Stabenow.
After defending Biden publicly to a gaggle of reporters, Stabenow asked for a private pull-aside with the first lady. “She told Jill that she’d known Joe for a long, long time and supported him on every level,” write Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN anchor Jake Tapper in their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. “But, Stabenow said, she and her colleagues were concerned about what they’d seen at the debate. They cared about Joe. They were worried about him.”
“We don’t know if this was a onetime thing or if there’s something more going on with the president, Stabenow said to the First Lady. But you know,” the authors write, paraphrasing the now-retired Michigan senator. “The First Lady didn’t answer the senator’s implied question, but she later fumed about it to White House staffers.”
Original Sin, hitting bookstores today, is a valuable play-by-play of the lengths to which the former president’s inner circle went to hide Biden’s decline from the American people. This included savaging the reputations of special counsel Robert Hur, long-shot 2024 primary rival Dean Phillips, and anyone who questioned Biden’s competence along the way.
Even though the book relies heavily on anonymous sourcing, it’s an important look into what the authors call “Biden’s own mythology” — the theory that a perennially underestimated Joe could overcome any obstacle. They describe the president’s inflated ego, telling readers that “he saw himself as a man of historic achievements, akin to FDR and LBJ.” Over Biden’s half-century in politics, family members, longtime aides, and the president himself developed what the authors call a “near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again,” no matter the challenge. This led the senior-most advisers to shoot down any chatter about whether running for reelection was a bad idea — even when polls consistently showed that most voters noticed Biden’s age-related decline and judged him as not fit enough for another term.
The book is a very, very harsh critique of Jill Biden and the first couple’s top aides, especially Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anthony Bernal, Anita Dunn, Bob Bauer, Jeff Zients, Annie Tomasini, and Ron Klain. But interestingly, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is hardly mentioned. According to the book’s index, her name appears on only two pages in the book, though it’s possible she’s quoted as an anonymous source elsewhere. And cabinet officials — many of whom have their eyes on 2028 — also get off scot-free (largely, as the book argues, because they were denied access to the president).
The book does not explore in much detail Kamala Harris’s role in the cover-up. If anything, it reveals how little Biden’s inner circle trusted or respected the former vice president — and how much she was insulated from the Oval Office as a result. According to Tapper and Thompson, she was seen by members of Biden’s inner circle as lazy and rude. “Several quietly expressed buyer’s remorse,” they report, to the point where some believed he should have picked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to serve as vice president instead.
And contrary to the hopes of conservative journalists, the book doesn’t really explore the White House press corps’ incuriosity about — or even perpetuation of — the cover-up, save for a few passing references to most reporters’ decision to gloss over Hunter Biden’s legal troubles and the special counsel investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. Recently resurfaced news clips of Tapper from 2020 show him indignantly rebuking Lara Trump for noticing Biden’s decline. “I think you were mocking his stutter,” Tapper scolds her. Last week, ahead of the book’s release, Tapper issued a mea culpa after being confronted with this and similar clips in which he argued against people questioning Biden’s competence. “Some of the criticism is fair,” he said, adding that he’s looking back on his own coverage “with humility.”
Tapper and Thompson do, however, expose the Biden press team’s efforts to gaslight reporters into submission. One humiliating anecdote tells of an anonymous reporter who was working on a story about the increasing frequency of Biden’s memory lapses, only to relent and drop the story for fear of punishment by the Biden White House:
The message from the White House was clear, this reporter believed: If she went forward with the story from anonymous aides, the White House would aggressively dispute it, on the record, and portray her as a liar. The tacit threat worked.
The book includes a behind-the-scenes look at Biden’s cognitive decline that will not be surprising to the millions of Americans who had doubts about his fitness early on. As early as December 2019, when Biden was a candidate in the Democratic primary, he struggled to recall the name of his longtime adviser Mike Donilon, who at that point had been working for Biden for nearly four decades. His memory lapses grew more frequent. In 2022, Biden reportedly struggled to recall the names of top White House aides, including National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Communications Director Kate Bedingfield. And last summer, he reportedly did not recognize movie star George Clooney at a fundraiser.
By early 2023, the authors write, “the president was having behind-the-scenes moments where he seemed completely out of it, spent, exhausted, almost gone.” By 2024, cabinet secretaries became convinced they couldn’t count on him to “perform at 2:00 a.m. during an emergency.” And yet the deception continued: During his reelection campaign, Biden staffers avoided scheduling events in the evening, shortened his speeches, and eliminated unscripted question-and-answer sessions during fundraisers. At one point, campaign staffers began editing videos to play in slow motion to disguise how slowly the octogenarian president walked.
Many on-the-record anecdotes from Democratic operatives and politicians privately raising alarm at Biden’s decline read like post-dropout efforts from cowardly politicos trying to save face after the fact and protect their own legacies and political futures. One example: Tapper and Thompson report on a private conversation between Barack Obama and Biden in June 2023, when the 44th president reportedly cautioned his former vice president that his 2020 GOP rival would be difficult to beat again — not exactly a profile in courage from Obama, whose grip on the party was arguably stronger than Biden’s and who could’ve spoken up when it mattered most.
Even now, the Democratic Party’s leaders are batting away questions about the cover-up — what they knew and when about the decline of Biden’s cognitive and physical health. These questions aren’t easy to ignore, especially in light of his recently announced prostate cancer diagnosis and the release over the weekend of the audio of Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
As National Review’s editors wrote in reaction to the announcement of Biden’s late-stage metastatic cancer,
This latest episode serves as a stark reminder that, once trust is lost, it is nigh on impossible to regain. . . . That those who are in the midst of reading about this deception will have questions about the veracity of those figures’ latest declaration is not a problem or an indignity or a sign of an ugly culture; it is the most natural thing in the world.