New book reflects Biden family's delusions of grandeur and how their ‘greatest strength is living in their own reality'
There were so many lies told by Joe Biden, his wife and their aides that it's hard to distinguish delusion from reality when assessing his disastrous presidency and determining who needs to be held accountable for all the crimes and coverups.
But let's start with Hunter Biden.
According to an exclusive preview of the upcoming book 'Original Sin' by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, at the same time that the White House and Hunter were denying the existence of his abandoned 'Laptop from Hell' in early 2022, Biden aides were so concerned about the political fallout that they secretly organized for the Democratic National Committee to obtain a copy of the hard drive.
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'The [re-election] campaign needed to be politically prepared, and Biden needed to be personally prepared,' the authors say.
President Biden's aides created a defensive dossier laying out the most damning material that could be weaponized against Joe in his re-election campaign, writes columnist Miranda Devine.
AP
Biden aides spent months mining the copy, through Hunter's homemade porn, crack addiction and hooker fetish, not to mention the copious evidence of influence peddling and millions of dollars of payments from China and Ukraine.
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In the end, they created a defensive dossier laying out the most damning material that could be weaponized against Joe in his re-election campaign.
Spoiling for a fight
In early 2023, after Republicans took back the House and prepared to hold investigations into Biden family corruption, Joe's personal lawyer, Bob Bauer, 'privately met with the president and the First Lady for an hour to go through all the sordid details,' and perhaps to convince them that running for re-election would put the entire family through unnecessary embarrassment and legal jeopardy.
(Neither Bauer nor DNC communications director Rosemary Boeglin responded to requests for confirmation last week, so we are relying on Tapper and Thompson's fact-checking.)
Unlike Biden's aides, Hunter was looking forward to the fight. He had 'the delusion that this would be good for him or for his father . . . He would finally get a chance to fight back after lying low. Biden aides sensed that Hunter saw an opportunity to redeem his reputation.'
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According to Tapper and Thompson, Hunter 'brushed off' the sordid revelations from the laptop: 'The influence peddling, the infidelities, the drug use, the child he had denied.
'He was clean and in a new relationship; that's all that mattered.'
The authors also reveal that Biden's team was unhappy about Hunter's 2021 memoir 'Beautiful Things,' which the then-first son saw as an opportunity to whitewash his past and launch himself on the national stage.
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'In their view, any day spent discussing Hunter and his antics was a bad day for Joe Biden. The president's son thought he was politically sharper than most of his dad's advisers and often told Biden when he thought particular aides weren't serving the president well. Aides had to pick their battles with Hunter.'
But they put their feet down when they learned that Hunter intended to 'do a book tour through South Carolina, stopping at famed Black churches to talk about his crack addiction . . .
'Biden's advisers argued it would turn into a circus and come across as tone-deaf. Hunter relented.'
Perhaps the deepest insight from 'Original Sin' is an acknowledgement that Joe Biden has spent a lifetime spinning self-aggrandizing fantasy into a shared delusion that ensnared his entire family and closest aides — and ultimately the Democratic Party.
'The Bidens' greatest strength is living in their own reality,' someone close to the family told the authors. 'And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn't going to die. Hunter's sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the narrative and repeat it.'
Tapper and Thompson describe the shared delusion as 'almost a theology, a near-religious faith in Biden's ability to rise again . . . Part of that theology is made up of narratives of questionable accuracy. The image of Joe-aviators, ice cream, 1967 Corvette — as avuncular and Jill as warm. These are not universally held impressions among those who know them well.
'The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving 'my word as a Biden,' but they had another, more private saying: 'Never call a fat person fat.' It wasn't just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts . . .
'From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to admit that Biden was declining.'
Reality check
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The delusional reality that Joe created is another way of saying that he has always been a pathological liar, with a Houdini-like ability to obfuscate and play the sympathy card to wriggle out of tight spots that would have been career-ending for anyone else.
The 'original sin' referred to in the title of the Tapper-Thompson book is Biden's decision to run for re-election in 2024 despite evidence of significant physical and cognitive decline, which his wife Jill and their inner circle tried to hide from the public.
'Original Sin' has opened the door for Democrats to pin all blame for their disastrous loss in the 2024 election on the former president.
But Biden's prostate cancer diagnosis, announced in a statement Sunday from his personal office on the eve of the book's publication, will conveniently mute the criticism. It is the ultimate sympathy card.
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