Vital Account of Biden’s Decline

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Press, 352 pp., $32)

Joe Biden’s was a presidency encumbered by chronic, preexisting conditions. The overarching condition was a mythologized persona—avuncular, vibrant, warm—long curated by Biden and guarded by his compliant staff. In exchange for this devotion, Biden had left a long trail of disenchantment among those who knew and worked with him. In 2012, the New Yorker profiled Jeff Connaughton, a Biden Senate staffer who became a lobbyist, about his time with “Scranton Joe.” Connaughton recalled how, in 1994, he needed a reference for a job opportunity in the Clinton White House and asked Ted Kaufmann, then Biden’s chief of staff, if the senator would make a call on his behalf. Biden refused. “Jeff, don’t take this personally,” Kaufmann reportedly told Connaughton. “Biden disappoints everyone. He’s an equal-opportunity disappointer.”

The disappointments were overshadowed by Biden’s decades-long capacity to bewitch journalists and voters. As senator, Biden was strapping and bombastic, a fixture on cable news and the media’s go-to for a colorful quote. As vice president, he was the likable, gaffe-prone statesman who sported aviators, drove classic cars, and never turned down an ice cream cone. But the act faded in the White House. As president, amid the peak delirium of Covid and wokeness, Biden was the distressing sight anyone with an aging relative understands—frail and distant.

Just as media coverage of this book ramped up, Biden disclosed a prostate cancer diagnosis. Biden “did not develop [cancer] in the last 100, 200 days,” Emanuel’s oncologist brother Ezekiel told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.”

That condition was not visible, but Biden’s growing senility was. Ari Emanuel, CEO of talent and entertainment company Endeavor and brother of Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, captured Americans’ feelings about the president’s increasingly obvious struggles. As reported by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson in Original Sin, their account of Biden’s decline and its cover-up, Emanuel shouted to Biden chief of staff Ron Klain in 2023: “We’re seeing it! . . . It’s called age! It happens!”

Yet, a little more than a year ago, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough had declared on his show: “I’ve spent a good deal of time with Joe Biden . . . He’s cogent. But I undersold it when I said he was cogent. He’s far beyond cogent. In fact, I believe he’s better than he’s ever been.” Just one day before last June’s fateful presidential debate, the New York Times characterized as “misleading” clips revealing Biden’s age and condition. Tapper himself—as critics such as Megyn Kelly and Mark Halperin have reminded him—was a prominent media voice denying Biden’s mental decline and condemning those, especially on the political right, who were willing to point what was obvious to millions of Americans.

With Dana Bash, Tapper co-moderated the disastrous CNN Biden–Trump debate last June 27. As recounted in Original Sin, following Biden’s flubbed line—“We finally beat Medicare”—Bash wrote on a piece of paper and passed it to Tapper: “He just lost the election.” The myth was finally shattered.

Despite the well-earned criticism Tapper has received for his coverage of the Biden administration, he and Thompson, the most visible reporter after the debate fallout, have coauthored a gripping and disturbing chronicle of a presidency defined by obfuscation and denial. In the literature of campaign stories, such as Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes (which covered Biden’s 1988 presidential run), and White House accounts, like John F. Harris’s The Survivor (about Clinton’s presidency), Original Sin will serve as a foundation for understanding the bewildering dynamics of Biden’s term. The authors observe that Biden’s decline epitomizes a culture surrounding prominent lawmakers in Washington. “Welcome to a system where power is distributed by seniority,” they write. “And where spouses, children, staffers, and lobbyists invest deeply in the life and success of an individual politician, then grow reluctant to give it all up.”

Original Sin dispassionately presents the pivotal moments of Biden’s presidency: his son Hunter’s struggles and trial, his interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, his D-Day visit to France, George Clooney’s New York Times op-ed urging the president to withdraw. Based on extensive interviews, the authors conclude: Biden “had moments of incoherence, of a stark inability to communicate or recognize people or recall important facts.” They add: “Those same critics continued to the end to attest to his ability to make sound decisions, if on his own schedule.”

Tapper and Thompson offer vivid portraits of the personalities involved in covering up the president’s condition. To succeed in the Biden subculture, you had to show your allegiance “not to the presidency, not to the American people, not to the country, but to the Biden theology,” they write. Among the loyalists were Annie Tomasini, deputy chief of staff, and Anthony Bernal, the “prized pupil” of Dr. B. (as Jill Biden called herself). “They were the Bidens’ eyes and ears, the keepers of the flame, the protectors of the myth,” Tapper and Thompson write. In those roles, they put the lie to another Biden myth—his supposed intolerance for staff mistreatment. White House aides “thought Bernal was confiding in them, only to discover that he was insulting them to others,” they report. “Some even described him as the worst person they had ever met.”

Then there was Biden’s “Politburo”—advisers Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Bruce Reed—who had decades of experience with the president and shielded him from his abysmal polling numbers. A long-time fixture in Democratic politics, Donilon shaped Biden’s 2020 messaging—“a fight for the soul of the nation.” He fervently believed that messaging on “democracy” would secure Biden’s reelection in November. In a March 2024 New Yorker report, he predicted “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”

“I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night,” Democratic strategist David Axelrod told the magazine’s Evan Osnos. Indeed, Biden’s childhood neighborhood—Green Ridge, an Irish Catholic Democratic bastion—dramatically shifted Republican last November, and the region as a whole fueled Donald Trump’s 2024 winning margin over Kamala Harris in Pennsylvania.

Yet, as the book shows, even before Biden quit the race, he was more focused on foreign policy—the war in Ukraine and saving NATO, for example—and apparently believed in his administration’s economic messaging. Moreover, the Politburo, especially Donilon, was dismissive of Biden’s campaign pollsters and their despairing outlook after the debate. Until the bitter end, Donilon told Biden he could win.

The Biden saga is haunted by historical irony. In 1972, Biden, then a 29-year-old Delaware lawyer who didn’t meet the constitutional age requirement until after election day, pulled out an upset win over incumbent Republican senator Cale Boggs, then 63, who advertised that “he [got] stuff done.” An AP report that November described Biden’s campaign as “aggressive, media-oriented” and the candidate himself as “Kennedyesque.”

Last year, a geriatric version of Camelot (itself a myth) played out at the White House. “By late 2023, Biden’s staff was pushing as much of his schedule as possible to midday, when Biden was at his best,” they report. When he was at the White House, he would retire to the residence around 5:15 p.m., and “he rarely came back down.” And yet, last April, the Biden campaign advertised that the president “gets things done.” The day after the disastrous debate, Jack Schlossberg—John F. Kennedy’s only grandson—posted an Instagram video supportive of Biden with Vogue, which had just published its latest and most inopportune cover of the First Lady. Schlossberg lamented the negative media coverage and advised his youthful followers to think about tomorrow and who can “get stuff done.” Less than a month later, Biden was out of the race.

Earlier this year, Donilon, at a Harvard Kennedy School conversation about the Oval Office, discussed Biden’s acuity as president. “You see it written as like it’s fact: Biden was mentally impaired. I didn’t see that,” he said, noting the president’s negotiation of a complicated prison swap with Russia on the day he dropped out.

“We lost this narrative,” concluded Donilon, who, as Original Sin reports, was paid $4 million to work on Biden’s campaign. (Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chair, made just $300,000.) A premium price for a hard-sell—and, as Tapper and Thompson show, a scandalous cover up.

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