How Joe Biden’s White House scandalously covered up his cognitive decline
Obfuscation over the president’s deterioration is a scandal on a par with Watergate, says Jake Tapper in an interview about his book, Original Sin.
It is June 27, 2024, the presidential election debate in Atlanta, Georgia. Joe Biden, the incumbent president, is seeking a second term. So is the insurgent, anti-establishment candidate former president Donald Trump. It is a campaign rematch. Much is at stake.
Jake Tapper, journalist and anchor with CNN, is moderating with colleague Dana Bash. Tapper sees Biden walk slowly on stage. He is not surprised, as he has been covering Biden, but he thinks millions of Americans may be.
“He (Biden) starts talking,” Tapper recalls in an interview with Inquirer. “He obviously has some sort of cold. So, he sounds even older and his voice is thinner and reedier than normal, but other than that it’s fine for the first question. I asked him about the economy. Donald Trump responded.
“Then everything started to go off the rails. (Biden) is talking about his economic record and completely loses his train of thought. Doesn’t even know what he’s saying. He’s grabbing for comfort phrases and ultimately says, ‘We finally beat Medicare.’ ”
It was a seminal moment. Tapper says it was shocking to see Biden stumble so badly. There were stunned reactions from millions of viewers around the world. Tapper wrote “holy smokes” on an iPad that communicated with the control room. Bash passed him a note: “He just lost the election.”
“This was the president of the US who had one job that night, which is to reassure the American people and the world that he was not too old, that he could do the job, that he had the acuity,” Tapper says. What was running through Tapper’s mind? “Oh my god, he’s a lot worse than I thought he was.”
The story of Biden’s cognitive decline and its cover-up is the subject of Original Sin, Tapper’s No. 1 best-selling book co-written with Alex Thompson. It is based on documents and interviews conducted after the election, when people could speak freely.
Tapper and Thompson write about Biden, his family and staff lying to the American people and to themselves about his “condition and limitations” and going to “desperate efforts” to hide the extent of his cognitive and physical deterioration. Biden, they write, was narcissistic and reckless, gripped by a self-delusion. It is both compelling and disturbing.
This is one of the greatest presidential scandals. Biden should not have run for re-election. The authors raise serious questions about Biden’s capacity to do the job – the most powerful in the world – and how much we knew about what was going on behind closed doors. The lies and the cover-up make for astonishing reading.
When Biden ran for president in 2020, he promised to be the bridge candidate who would defeat Trump and pass power to a new generation. Trump’s first term had been an unmitigated disaster and ended with a riot at the US Capitol that he encouraged, and an attempt to overturn an election and stage a coup d’etat.
Even before that shocking 2024 debate performance, I argued that Biden should not run for re-election. He had pledged to save the soul of America and, it was thought, depart after a single term. This would have allowed a primary process to select a more viable Democrat candidate than Kamala Harris, who was parachuted in just months before election day. As a result, the man who defeated Trump paved the way for the latter’s return.
Biden would be the oldest president if he defeated Trump in 2020. Tapper asked him in September that year about his health.
“The American people have been lied to before by presidents about the president’s health – FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan,” Tapper said. “Will you pledge that, if you’re elected, you will be transparent about your health?” Biden replied: “Yes.” He lied.
Harris was interviewed by CNN’s Anderson Cooper after Biden’s 2024 debate stumble and defended him to the hilt. When Cooper pushed Harris on the president’s performance, she became “visibly angry” and “took it personally”. After the camera was turned off, she said to colleagues: “This motherf--ker doesn’t treat me like the damn vice-president.”
Was Harris in on the cover-up? The authors are careful not to suggest this. “I don’t know what she actually believes,” Tapper says. “We did not find anyone who said that she had said anything about Biden being so addled he couldn’t do the job. We did not find that. Now, she is loyal to a fault.” But she often only saw him at “high adrenaline moments” in the Oval Office or Situation Room, he says.
There was, nevertheless, some reporting about Biden’s seemingly limited activities and reduced mental acuity and cognitive skills. There also was special counsel Robert Hur’s report into Biden’s handling of classified files that raised serious questions about his capacity. Hur decided not to prosecute because a jury would likely view Biden as an old man with memory issues.
“There were gaffes and errors and embarrassing moments in front of the cameras that we all saw,” Tapper says. “But also they limited how much time he was in front of the cameras. He didn’t do major interviews. He didn’t do big press conferences. They hid him from people as much as possible.”
The book reveals that Biden’s schedule was often light. Most of his meetings and events were on weekdays, between 10am and 4pm. By 2023 and into 2024, there were few meetings with officials after lunch. Biden often had a scheduled dinner at 4.30pm and retreated to the residence by 5.15pm, taking some calls, but rarely returned to the Oval Office.
Efforts undertaken by White House staff – dubbed The Politburo – to manage perceptions of Biden’s health is staggering. His schedule was tightly managed, and he rarely saw some staff and few members of cabinet. Governors Gavin Newsom (California) and Josh Shapiro (Pennsylvania), and others, were reassuring voters publicly about Biden but privately expressing concerns.
Tapper has come in for criticism that he was not sufficiently sceptical of reports of Biden’s physical and mental state. In fairness, we clearly know more now than we knew then and he was also dealing with a tidal wave of misinformation from Biden’s staff, cabinet members and congressional figures. (By the way, Trump talks incoherent nonsense almost every day.)
“Without question, knowing then what I know now, I wish I had been more aggressive about it,” Tapper says. “But I saw what other people saw and I talked to Democrats and everybody said, ‘Oh, he’s fine. He’s fine. He’s a little older, but he’s fine.’
“So, I mean, I think that there’s a lot of criticism that the media should take when it comes to this issue, but by the same token, you know, we’re not omniscient. We’re not able to see through walls. I think some of it’s a little overblown but, that said, like yeah, I wish I’d done a better job.”
So, could Biden adequately undertake the demands and responsibilities of being president? Tapper and Thompson are cautious on this. His domestic legislative achievements were considerable, he rebuilt trust with allies, united NATO and took the fight to Russia over Ukraine.
Tapper says it really depends on “how you define doing the job”. They are not diagnosing dementia. Yet Democratic senators Mark Warner and Michael Bennet recall in the book discussions with Biden where he did not seem to be on top of issues, and was confused and muddled.
“The job of president is the job of being able to do it all the time,” Tapper says.
It raises the question: why did Democrats allow Biden an almost unchallenged bid for re-election?
“Biden had convinced the Democratic Party of three things,” Tapper says. “One, the fact that he is the only one that had ever beat Trump. That’s true. Two, therefore, he was the only one who could beat Trump. That’s just a theory. That’s not a fact. And three, that Trump posed an existential threat to the US and thus the world. A lot of Democrats agreed with him on that. So, anyone who deviated from supporting Biden was then accused of helping Trump.”
It is unknown, of course, whether a different Democratic candidate could have beaten Trump. But Trump was by no means popular, he had considerable baggage, and what is not in doubt is that Harris ran a poor campaign and was a weak overall candidate, which only helped Trump.
“A Democrat who was not him (Biden) could be a stronger candidate,” Tapper judges.
Where does the cover-up about Biden’s true mental and physical condition rank among presidential scandals? Tapper says he is not in the business of offering listicles but does say it is in the realm of Richard Nixon’s Watergate, Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and George W. Bush’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“I think it’s pretty big,” he says. “I don’t know that any criminal acts were committed. But certainly you could argue it had much more impact on the world than the Clinton scandals. You could even argue that while Watergate was a criminal activity and people went to prison for it, this ultimately had more of an impact than Watergate.
“It’s very difficult for me to compare malfeasances. Like, they’re all bad, but I think it is a pretty horrifying scandal in terms of how much the American people were lied to about what was going on behind the scenes with Biden, especially in late 2023 and throughout 2024.”
To my mind, Biden has trashed his reputation for being a straight-shooting, no-nonsense politician of the utmost integrity. He was delusional, dishonest and reckless, as were his family and staff. His family pardons issued on the way out the Oval Office are also utterly disgraceful.
None of this means that Trump, a criminal, is somehow worthy of the presidency. (Australians preferred Harris over Trump.) His administration is petty, juvenile and deceitful with an incoherent approach to policymaking and ignores courts, shakes down media organisations, threatens and punishes allies, and befriends dictators while he and his family monetise the presidency.
The sorry story of Biden’s accelerated decline in office undermined the integrity of the presidency. There was a need for greater transparency. The media, political institutions and his party were not able to keep him accountable. It was a cover-up.
“In the US, we don’t have any requirements for presidents or anyone really to be transparent about their health,” Tapper says.
“People are ageing more and more, and we see CEOs in their 90s and senators in their 80s and 90s. There needs to be discussion, at least, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin Random House) is out now.
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