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Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
By Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Penguin Press
332 pages
The subtitle of Original Sin, a new book about former President Joe Biden’s reluctance to leave office in 2024, says it all: “His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” Due to Biden’s decision to run for re-election and the Democratic Party’s subsequent failure at the polls, disaster is what we’re living with now, day by day, with consequences and repercussions nearly impossible to predict.
Jake Tapper, CNN lead anchor, and Alex Thompson, a reporter for Axios, have written a devastating account about Biden and the colossal misjudgment that led to the return of Donald Trump.
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As a result of the so-called “cover-up” (a questionable charge, since many people who interacted with Biden in late 2023-2024 could see firsthand the extent of his decline):
“Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a white House that had been gaslighting the American people.”
Much of Original Sin is told in short sentences and short paragraphs, sometimes at a breathless pace. This seems to be, for better or worse, the lingua franca of history-as-we’re-living-it books in our time. The authors come down hard on Biden, his wife Jill, and a small coterie of advisers (known as “the Politburo”), at times long after the point’s been made.
Recapping the travails of Biden’s son Hunter, for example, makes for dismal reading. But it offers context for what led Biden to abandon his 2020 pledge to serve as a “bridge” (a single term as president) between generations. Many pundits have come to believe the Hunter Biden situation helped accelerate the ex-president’s mental and physical decline.
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Tapper and Thompson note that obscuring the nature of an elderly statesman’s well-being isn’t unusual in the nation’s capital:
“Covering for an aging politician is commonplace in modern Washington, a town that has a long, gruesome record of powerful seniors trying to obscure their obvious infirmities—with the complicity of their colleagues, families, and staffs, who have turned a blind eye to these crises.”
It’s a straightforward, if not obvious fact: “covering” for an aged senator or congressperson is bad enough. Knowingly doing the same for the man with the nuclear codes is something else entirely.
In a book of this nature, readers can anticipate encountering some anonymous sources.
(It’s part of that “history-as-we’re-living it” thing.) But the high degree of anonymity in Original Sin is troubling for a couple of reasons.
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For one thing, it suggests that Democratic Party leaders are still, midway through 2025, unwilling to openly discuss all the factors that led to election-year disaster.
Also, Tapper and Thompson expect readers to take a lot of information on faith. Even if everything they report is true, anonymity is yet another easy cudgel by which the current president’s supporters can attack representatives of the “fake media.”
A tricky situation, to say the least.
One “non-anonymous” source, New York Times reporter Michael Shear, told the authors that “the Biden team’s handling of that story, and all the others the paper wrote about the president’s age and health, basically amounted to one thing: a complete denial that the issue even existed. Every conversation with a Biden official went like this: ‘He’s exactly the same person he always was. Age is not an issue. He’s incredibly sharp in meetings. There are no accommodations being made for him because of his age.’”
As we all know now, these reassurances were false.
The authors recount in excruciating detail the events of June 27, 2024, the night of the Biden-Trump debate—the night when everything changed. Viewers across the country and around the world saw for themselves what Biden’s senior advisers had worked so hard to conceal:
“The split screen of the debate didn’t benefit Biden, who looked pale and considerably older than his three-years-younger opponent, and whose slack-jawed expressions and undetermined stare at the floor in front of him suggested that he wasn’t even aware he was on camera for the entire ninety minutes of the debate.”
Speaking of anonymity, an unnamed source identified as “a senior administration official” looked back on the electoral tragedy of 2024, saying, “I blame his inner circle, and I blame him [Biden]. What utter and total hubris not to step aside and be a one-term president, as he said he would, and have an open primary when there was time to let the process play out. Even though he did so many good things for this country, I can never forgive him.”
With respect to the calamity of Trump 2.0, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and it may be a long time before many of us can forgive Joe Biden for his part.
Author Bio:
Highbrow Magazine chief book critic Lee Polevoi is the author of two novels, The Confessions of Gabriel Ash and The Moon in Deep Winter.
For Highbrow Magazine