Original sin: How Biden’s decline was deliberately hidden

Joe Biden hadn’t been up past 9pm for months when he was asked to shuffle into a TV studio to debate a surging Donald Trump.

Donald Trump arrived three hours early for the debate against a shuffling Joe Biden. Picture: Getty Images

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Donald Trump arrived three hours early for his only televised debate with Joe Biden during last year’s race for the White House. Always at home in a TV studio, he was keen to limber up. The oldest president in American history, by contrast, was suffering from a heavy cold. He shuffled in a few minutes before the studio lights went red at 9pm.

Apparently, Biden had not been up so late in months.

In debate rehearsals at Camp David, in the few windows when the president was not napping, advisers had told him “his mouth was agape when he wasn’t speaking and urged him to close it.”

This advice wasn’t anywhere near enough to save him.

Over the next excruciating 90 minutes, every lie his team had told about him was exposed. Even Trump seemed to take pity on his opponent. Biden’s pitch to be president until he was 86, never strong, unravelled that evening.

These are some of the more compelling details from the new book, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper, who was the CNN debate co-moderator that evening, and his colleague, Alex Thompson.

“Holy smokes”, Tapper texted up to the control room as Biden stumbled.

Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson lays bear the extent to which the Democrats were prepared to hide the shuffling, incoherent president from voters.

But “it was not just one bad night,” the authors say. While millions were shocked by Biden’s unintelligible, slack-jawed performance at the debate, this book makes plain that some Democrats weren’t surprised at all. Though they had seen him like this behind closed doors, they didn’t say anything. For a variety of reasons, they “rationalized their silence.”

For at least four years, every member of the Democratic establishment lied about their boss. It took a brave George Clooney, a movie actor, to say this emperor had no clothes. Why should Americans believe any future progressive claim to power? Why, indeed, should viewers trust anything CNN has to say given the complicity of these authors, their employees, in the cover-up?

The Original Sin was Adam and Eve’s. The first humans convinced themselves, with a little nudging from a serpent, that eating fruit forbidden by God would make them “as gods, knowing good and evil.”

The titular analogy to Genesis 3 captures the self-regard of this book. For Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, career Biden watchers, “the original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection – followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.”

Across 345 highly readable pages, the fall of the latest Democratic administration is presented as a sort of end of the world for progressives. How could we have been duped by a serpentine establishment to believe Biden was “sharp as a tack”? The mental sharpness (and lack thereof) of the president is a metaphor across the book. His physical “gait” features prominently – it was often the first thing people noticed about him.

The 46th president, it can now be revealed, was a dead man shuffling. The first half the book tells us how his handlers – in the “politburo” – tried to disguise this, the second, how this became impossible once Biden had debated Trump.

CNN and MSNBC were keen to join Democrats in pursuing a lawfare campaign against Donald Trump; they were negligent in applying a similar fitness for office standard to Joe Biden. There is no atoning for this in the book.

The single greatest act of dis/misinformation – a charge they are fond of levelling at their opponents – was perpetrated by the Democratic party. The party which controls the key modes of American cultural production – from the universities to Hollywood – and of institutional power – from the federal bureaucracy to public schools – hid the incapacity of its leader.

Because the left control so many of the institutions of American life, the collapse of trust in those institutions, a key part of Trump’s rise, will be paid by the Democrats. Their mendacity around the Biden presidency suggests they are not keen to begin the payments.

This book perpetuates Democratic wishful thinking: “If only we had replaced Joe with Kamala sooner. She just didn’t have enough time.”

The party’s failure was much more fundamental than that.

Tapper and Thompson describe with uncommon humanity how the death of Beau, Biden’s eldest son, from cancer in 2015, began his decline. They highlight tactical missteps, like agreeing to debate Trump. The calamity, however, was strategic.

The tactics of getting Biden over the line a second time meant that the strategy that had produced the Democrats’ bind was never interrogated. In 2020, they had nominated an old man who promised to be a one-term ‘bridge’ to a younger successor.

Elided in this plan was a First Lady – who had no intention of allowing her husband to be so temporary a fixture – and a running mate – sold to Americans as a diversity hire – who few members of her own party saw as presidential material.

Better debate rehearsals or having aides walk beside him to conceal his shuffle was never going to compensate for these big strategic errors.

This is a TV account of a televisual ‘catastrophe’ (their word) by progressive TV journalists. The deeper issues affecting American politics get subsumed, when they should be primary: institutional distrust, economic malaise, cultural alienation, foreign policy failure. These are occasional backdrops to the deeply personal, tragic, Lear-like, collapse of the Biden presidency.

Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden. Picutre: Mandel Ngan / AFP

The narrative of mental and physical decay obfuscates the deeper issues with which the book inadequately grapples. Hunter Biden, the president’s drug-addled son, is worthy of Shakespearian depiction. But his travails consume too much airtime in the book – no non-politician gets more mentions, not even Jill.

The deeper story is the Democrat crack-up this first family illuminates.

For thirty years the American left has embraced a Clinton-Obama-Biden-Pelosi worldview. This embedded in American economics an ambivalence toward the fate of blue-collar workers, the traditional base of the Democrats; Joe Biden’s father cleaned boilers to make ends meet.

It enabled a progressive culture where the finger-wagging moralism of LGBTQI+ lobbies and climate activists deplored the men and women who put family, faith and flag first.

Blaming Old Joe for Donald Trump just won’t cut it. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

If you are on the political right, the portrayal of woke lefties, like Jane Fonda and Rob Reiner, melting down as the Biden wheels come off, will fill you with a warm glow. This book is for you as much as for the Democratic party it documents.

‘“We are totally fucked. This is over. It’s all over.” Donors were putting their heads in their hands.’ Despairing outbursts like this punctuate the book.

But conservative schadenfreude obscures the job of work confronting all Americans as they rebuild their democratic project for the inevitable post-Trump future.

The actual Democrats have so far proven incapable of it. The more significant cognitive decline was not Biden’s. It was the progressive left’s, over decades. They thought they were right, that if they lectured ordinary Americans long enough – from pronouns to abortion – they would retain power. The intrigue of the Biden cover-up – brilliantly told in these pages – should not obscure us to the challenges facing Democrats.

It took a revolution in the Republican party to deliver the Age of Trump. It will take something similar in the Democratic party to turn the 2030s into anything resembling the 1930s. Blaming Old Joe, his grasping wife and their courtiers for Donald Trump – fascinating and prurient as this account is – just won’t cut it.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Penguin, Politics 345pp, $29.99.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne