How Joe Biden's inner circle lied about the president's mental state
POLITICS
Original Sin
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Penguin Press, $32
Philip Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, is credited with conceiving the phrase 'journalism is the first rough draft of history'. Original Sin, by journalists Jake Tapper of CNN and Axios' Alex Thompson, is emblematic of the genre. You-are-there reporting of shocking gravitas. Ten months after President Joe Biden stood down from the 2024 election, they have produced a first draft of Biden's purge from power. It is suffused with relentless agony.
Biden's original sin is what he told Tapper in 2020, before he won that election. 'I guarantee you I will be totally transparent in terms of my health and all aspects of my health.' Tapper's conclusion: 'He was not.'
Biden told the nation when it was clear in 2020 he would take on Trump: 'Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else.' Biden, the oldest person to assume the presidency, was assuring his party he would pass the torch to the next generation to either Kamala Harris or any Democrat who could beat her to contest the 2024 election.
Biden loves infrastructure, but his pledge was ultimately a bridge to nowhere. It took Harris down, and the Democrats in Congress down, and it restored Trump to power. He won the nomination in 2020 when Democrats settled on Biden to fulfil their No.1 objective: to defeat Donald Trump and drive him from office. In 2022, Biden concluded that he could not and would not leave because he was convinced he could defeat Trump again. Even on the day after the 2024 election, he woke up believing he could have beaten Trump.
The tragedy of Biden is that he did beat Trump – but Biden did not defeat Trump. 'By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.' That is why the judgment of history on Biden will be unforgiving.
Tapper and Thompson's clinical indictment is fleshed out in forensic detail. They set out to prove that any view that Biden was not addled and could handle the presidency 24/7 was false. The palace guard of senior staff around the president – Tapper and Alexander call them 'The Politburo'– led Biden to believe that the work of his own pollsters showed that he could beat Trump. The authors report that no such polls existed.
The public saw the realities of Biden's day-to-day functioning: the stiff gait, his voice of whispers, his lack of command in unscripted media events, his misspeaking of names, places, dates. But 'what was going on in private was worse.'
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