By Bruce Wolpe
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 book’s authors write that Joe Biden was not honest with himself and his country about his decline.Credit: AP
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.”
They raise the curtain, from Biden needing a teleprompter to address his ardent financial backers, to not recognising George Clooney at a fundraiser, his physician’s concern that Biden might need a wheelchair in a second term, reporting that there was not any family discussion about whether he should run for a second term, and the unvarying assertion from the White House that there was no issue with Biden’s age and health.
Tapper and Thompson nail their case on the “performative” aspects of Biden’s job: public appearances and communication. It was painful as hell to watch Biden struggle and fail. But in terms of performing his job as president and commander in chief, no one – not his Cabinet or his staff – resigned and declared that he was not fit for office and could not function as president. That would have blown Biden out of the Oval before he froze in the debate with Trump.
Indeed, Bob Woodward, as authoritative as any journalist, concluded in his book, WAR (2024), that Biden was brilliant in managing Ukraine and Gaza and was fully up to what the office requires. Biden, he wrote, “will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership”.
Tapper and Thompson convict on their count of a cover-up of his condition, but they do not make the case that Biden could not discharge his constitutional responsibilities.
But if you cannot campaign, you cannot win. David Plouffe, counsellor to President Obama and a co-chair in the Harris campaign, insists. “Never again can we suggest to the people that what they’re seeing is not true.”
He is right.
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