Many books will be written about the rollercoaster presidential election of 2024.
One very significant book has already hit the shelves, and deals with arguably the most remarkable element of all: how the truth about Joe Biden’s declining mental and physical capabilities was deliberately hidden for years from the American public.
The publication of ‘Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again’ has resulted in some backlash towards the co-authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, and much of the criticism is fair.
As one of the most recognisable broadcasters on CNN, Tapper symbolises what conservative Americans find distasteful about the liberal media.
Both he and the Axios correspondent Thompson worked for the Democratic Party prior to becoming journalists, and likely lean significantly to the left themselves.
Tapper showed little interest in Biden’s obvious deficiencies until very recently, particularly during one notorious interview with Lara Trump, for which he has recently apologised.
As Megyn Kelly told Tapper during a bruising exchange as part of the book tour, many people believe he is “not the right messenger to bring the story about the cover-up, because you helped, you allowed it, and you likely did that out of a desire to help Joe Biden and hurt Donald Trump.”
All of this should be put to one side though, because ‘Original Sin’ makes for absorbing reading.
More importantly, the liberal bent of Tapper and Thompson is what has allowed them to interview 200 people with inside knowledge of what was happening within Biden’s family, administration, and party.
What emerges from these discussions – most of which took place off-the-record – is a drama of Shakespearean proportions. Little wonder that the epigraph comes from ‘King Lear’ – “They told me I was everything. ‘Tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.”Tapper was one of the moderators during the fateful televised debate between Biden and Trump on June 27th 2024, but Biden’s prior deterioration is laid bare at the outset.
“Since at least 2022, he has had moments where he cannot recall the names of top aides who he sees every day. He can sometimes seem incoherent. He is increasingly prone to losing his train of thought, occasionally speaking so softly that he cannot be understood, even if he is talking directly into a microphone. The Presidency requires someone who can perform at 2am during an emergency; Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this,” the authors write.
Biden’s extraordinary longevity in top-level American politics stems in part from his own courage in consistently bouncing back from adversity, and in part from the public’s admiration in response to this.
The close-knitted nature of his family – bonded by the deaths of two of the Biden children, and blighted by the addiction issues of the two surviving offspring – also played a role in the patriarch’s demise.
They believed in the cult of optimism which had built up around the man, and had become too comfortable living in their own alternate reality.
Biden family members and some of his closest aides – who, the authors write, were known as the ‘Politburo’ – managed to shield Biden’s growing problems from the American public, and as the 2024 election grew nearer, that meant even shielding the president from his own cabinet at times.
A complicit left-of-centre media – including CNN of course – allowed this to go mostly unnoticed, with conservative media outlets doing most of the running in highlighting what the vast majority of Americans could see with their own eyes every time Biden was forced to appear in front of cameras.
Biden had originally framed himself in 2020 as a ‘bridge candidate,’ who would likely depart the stage after one term and allow a younger successor to emerge.
The allure of continued power proved too much for Joe, however, and the same appears to be true for the former First Lady Jill Biden, who played an ever-more prominent role behind the scenes.
Tapper and Thompson reveal that the second term travel plans for ‘Dr. Jill’ were being drawn up, while at the same time, other Biden insiders pondered the possibility that her husband would soon require a second term wheelchair.
Hunter Biden plays a big role in this story, as his descent into addiction and criminality is said to have played a key role in accelerating his father’s decline.
Many Americans likely felt sympathy at first for a loving father standing by his ne’er-do-well offspring in spite of everything.
One of the most striking stories told here occurred during Biden’s 2020 election race, when he and the rest of the family organised an intervention for Hunter while gathered together in Delaware.
“Not a chance!” Hunter exclaimed, upon realising what was afoot.
“I’m so scared,” the soon-to-be President Biden said. “Tell me what to do.”
“Not f_____g this!” Hunter replied, before storming out the door.
But Hunter’s depredations – like starting a relationship with his brother Beau’s widow, and then introducing her to crack cocaine – would warrant more sympathy were his father and step-mother blameless. They are not.
When Hunter fathered a child by his stripper lover, he chose to deny his daughter entirely even after the paternity test proved little Navy Joan was his.
The authors write that Hunter instructed his father to do the same, and so the self-proclaimed family man Joe Biden did just that, repeatedly ignoring his youngest grandchild’s existence until he was shamed into acknowledging her by the leading journalist Maureen Dowd.
Even more shameful was President Biden’s smearing of the Special Counsel Robert Hur, whose accurate testimony about Biden’s mental deficiencies in early 2024 led to serious professional consequences for a public servant who chose not to fight back in the media.
In many important ways, this book makes clear that Joe Biden has at times been less a victim than a villain.
The most consequential mistake of all was surely the decision to choose the inept Kamala Harris as his running mate: a decision ostensibly inspired by the liberal obsession with race and gender, but which may also have been made by Biden in the knowledge that having an unpopular Vice President would strengthen his own hold on the presidency.
Harris’s inability to communicate effectively limited her media reach significantly after she became the Democratic candidate in the latter half of 2024, but the problems were much more deep-rooted.
Tapper and Thompson describe how before attending a soirée with friendly journalists and socialites in 2022, the Vice President’s terrified aides “held a mock soirée, with staff acting the part of guests. Aides weighed having wine served, so that Harris could practice with a glass or two, but ultimately decided not to.”
The TV drama ‘The West Wing’ inspired a generation or more of political consultants and journalists in the United States and further afield.
It too revolved around the presidential administration of an aging and much-loved Democratic patriarch, who was hiding the truth about his failing health, as a group of handsome and high-minded intellectuals work to confound the efforts of the nefarious and slow-witted Republicans.
That is where the similarities end. ‘Original Sin’ describes a White House filled with power hungry and deluded progressives, who believed that they could con the American people into re-electing a befuddled old man. Its central characters are motivated at least as much by a love of fame as by a love of country.
George Clooney’s surprise that President Biden did not recognise him at a fundraiser sums up Biden’s demise, but it also sums up today’s celebrity-infested Democratic Party.
Kamala Harris’s indignant reaction to Anderson Cooper’s reasonable questioning after Biden’s debate disaster – “this mother_____r doesn’t treat me like the damn Vice President” – does the same job even better.
According to this book, Biden’s visit to Ireland in 2023 re-energised him to some extent, as he experienced a type of adulation here which he never received on home soil.
It was, as POLITICO reported at the time, a “mutual love fest,” during which the always truthful Micheál Martin assured the world that four more years of Biden was exactly what was needed.
The years of lies about Biden’s health helped lead to President Trump’s victory in November, as did the painfully drawn-out aftermath to the Biden-Trump debate, where Democrats had to brazenly pretend that what the American people had just watched was somehow normal.
While participating in a frantic meeting with her party colleagues at that time, the former Democratic Congresswoman Susan Wild – who would go down in flames along with Harris in November – inadvertently provided the best quote of all: “How do we go after Trump for lying, if people see us as liars?”
By November 2024, the lies had caught up on America’s progressive elite, and ‘Original Sin’ helps to understand how this came about.
Tapper and Thompson can be criticised, but they have already shown more self-reflection than the vast majority of their journalistic colleagues.
