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Original Sin: how Team Biden wished away his decline until it was too late

Joe Biden mistook his victory in 2020 for a sweeping, FDR-like mandate. Officially, that was before age and decay caught up. Horrifically, for Democrats, in June 2024 a debacle of a debate against Donald Trump confirmed what Washington insiders had only dared whisper but what most voters had known: Biden should not have sought re-election.

Less than a month later, he was out, replaced as Democratic nominee by his vice-president, Kamala Harris. Now, Trump runs wild and Biden’s legacy is buried beneath a heap of unkind reporting – and bouquets of sympathy, after news of his cancer.

“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist is quoted as saying by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. “He stole an election from the Democratic party; he stole it from the American people.”

Tapper and Thompson concur. Over 350 engrossing pages, they deliver a stinging judgment, trenchantly written and well-sourced.

The two reporters spoke to about 200 people, including members of Congress, White House staffers and campaign insiders. Some reportedly sounded the alarm about Biden’s mental acuity and desperate efforts by aides to hide his deterioration. The alarm was not heeded.

Tapper is CNN’s lead DC anchor and chief Washington correspondent. Thompson is a national political correspondent for Axios and a CNN contributor. His speech at the recent White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was one for the ages.

“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

Original Sin begins with a bang. Its first chapter is titled “He Fucked Us”, from an on-record quote by David Plouffe, senior adviser to the Harris campaign, before that manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 winning effort. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” Plouffe says. Harris was a “great soldier”, but the race was “a fucking nightmare. …

“And it’s all Biden … He totally fucked us.” Try putting that toothpaste back in the tube. On the other hand, Plouffe doesn’t reveal what Harris knew about Biden’s fitness and when she knew it.

Biden loyalists return the favor, too, the authors write: “Many … felt that Harris didn’t put in the work and was also just not a very nice person. Some quietly expressed buyer’s remorse: They should have picked [Gretchen] Whitmer,” the Democratic governor of Michigan.

Tapper and Thompson report cold political facts. In 2020, identity politics played an outsize role in Biden’s VP pick. “It boils down to whether he has a Hispanic woman or a Black woman,” Harry Reid, the former Senate Democratic leader, said then.

Tapper and Thompson lay bare a sense of betrayal.

“The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2am during an emergency,” they write. “Cabinet secretaries in [Biden’s] own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”

Yet, Biden and his minions made sure to clear the field. The representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, Biden’s only challenger among elected officials, never had a prayer. Governors stayed on the sidelines.

Tapper and Thompson tell us one senior White House aide left because he or she didn’t think Biden should run again. Biden had been walled off from staff to shield his decline.

“I love Joe Biden,” the unnamed aide continues. “When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him. Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”

That ranks as an understatement. The cover of Original Sin shows Biden with hands covering his eyes. The former president, his family and his closest advisers – known as the “politburo” here – dwelt in a world of alternative facts.

“The Bidens’ greatest strength is living in their own reality,” a source tells Tapper and Thompson. “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.”

To quote Lewis Carroll: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

Biden’s decline was not sudden, according to Tapper and Thompson. The signs were there years ago: “During an eight-day, grueling bus tour in Iowa in December 2019, Biden gave his aides pause. While doing prep, he struggled to remember the name of longtime aide Mike Donilon. ‘You know, you know,’ he said, groping for it.”

Donilon had worked with Biden for nearly 40 years. It should have been time to start worrying. Cover-up and denial are foundational to the Biden saga.

This week brought Biden’s bad diagnosis.

“He did not develop [metastatic prostate cancer] in the last 100, 200 days,” Zeke Emanuel, a doctor, told MSNBC on Monday. “He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021 … I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that.”

Emanuel’s brother, Rahm, was Biden’s ambassador to Japan, and before that chief of staff to Obama.

Democrats must address such self-inflicted wounds. Disapproval of Trump may be all they need to retake the House next year. But reckoning and redirection will be needed to recapture the White House. The party’s brand circles the drain.

For now, Trump is the exception that proves the rule: America is no country for old presidents.