Missing the Inside Story on Biden Was Not the Media’s Primary Sin

T here is a tension at the heart of Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book about “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” At the end of the authors’ note that opens the book, they promise that they will tell the story that “was in front of our noses.” But how can anyone cover up what’s on full display? And who were the victims of this cover-up? By late 2021, less than a year into Joe Biden’s term, most Americans already thought he was too old for the job.

But there is a difference between concluding that, as a matter of common sense, having an octogenarian president is risky; seeing public appearances in which Biden was clearly past his peak performance; inferring that he was probably having worse days when the public wasn’t seeing him; and knowing that he sometimes forgot the names of people who had worked closely with him for decades. It’s that last type of datum that the public didn’t have — and, Tapper and Thompson show in detail, that Biden’s associates kept from us.

To make that case, Tapper and Thompson must essentially reverse Senator Howard Baker’s mantra during Watergate: Here, the question is what didn’t the president know, and when didn’t he know it? That makes for uncomfortable reading sometimes, as when Biden, at a loss for the name of communications aide Kate Bedingfield, calls her “Press.”

These vignettes will make any reader of normal character feel sorry for Biden, and wonder why the people around him did not have the decency to tell him it was time to go, if only for his own good. But the authors also show that it was not an accident that Biden had nobody around him to tell him that: His family had built a culture of avoiding unpleasant truths.

They also emphasize that Biden had been counted out and beaten the odds many times before. But that’s an occupational hazard of the presidency: Everyone who gets to the White House has proven himself fantastically lucky. That makes it all the more important for the winner to ensure that someone nearby is willing to puncture his fantasies. Biden, his family, and his team instead sought to punish anyone who made the obvious observations about his decline.

Then, too, Biden had his good days, which meant that people who came into only occasional contact with him — a category that eventually, thanks to his closest aides, came to include his entire cabinet — could think he was doing fine. And, as the authors (too) gently note, Biden always had a tendency to ramble and to invent self-serving fictions even at his best, making the decline a little harder to detect.

Even now, some Democrats are coming up with rationales for looking away. Why look backward at Biden when President Trump is on a rampage, they ask. Yet the worse Trump is, the more important it is for his opponents to figure out why he won. The answer is not just that Biden made a series of discrete errors, such as picking a politically unattractive vice president and clinging to power too long. It’s also that the Democratic Party, at its very top, routinely demonstrated that it did not trust the public and did not deserve trust itself.

The press is justifiably getting blame as well. Tapper and Thompson provided tougher coverage of Biden’s age and abilities than most D.C. reporters did, although each has admitted that in retrospect, they should have pressed the issue more. But the main failing of the press was not its failure to get the inside story.

The authors state that when Democrats released the transcript of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden, it showed that Biden’s claims about the interview had been false. Most reports about it didn’t mention that, Tapper and Thompson note. The information was in front of journalists’ noses. The press is taking a lasting hit because it missed the outside story.