If Jake Tapper was an anchor for Fox News instead of CNN, and Alex Thompson a correspondent for National Review instead of Axios, then non-MAGA Americans probably wouldn’t believe what’s written in their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
Furthermore, since the authors state that the book’s most important sources were Democrats inside the Biden White House, it’s safe to assume that most of those interviewed would not have opened up and told the whole truth to conservative journalists.
But since the authors and their sources come largely from the political left, there is no reason to doubt the book’s conclusions, with one big exception. Though the book details a dramatic cover-up involving White House staff, the Biden family, party leaders and media personalities, it fails to lay blame at the feet of its authors, who are equally culpable.
The book’s two most important conclusions are Biden’s “original sin” of pursuing a second term while in serious cognitive decline, and his inner circle’s hiding his decline while they presumably made many of the presidency’s decisions. Five unelected unconfirmed insiders comprised the istration’s “Politburo,” according to Tapper and Thompson. Those were Michael Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, Anita Dunn and Ron Klain.
To draw their conclusions, the authors conducted approximately 200 interviews and assert that “this book is rooted in Jake’s decades of covering Joe Biden … and draws from countless interviews with him over the years,” and also “relies heavily on Alex’s intense four years covering the Biden presidency and reelection campaign.”
Given their experience and access, the most amazing part of Original Sin is that nowhere in it do Tapper and Thompson provide even a hint of mea culpa about their own failure to report what they obviously knew or should have known: that the 46th president of the United States was not mentally or physically capable of handling his job.
On page after page, the book chronicles its authors’ culpability in that they knew of and yet failed to report in real time the following facts.
-- In a March 2020 speech, Biden forgot the most famous words in the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing,” he stammered.
-- David Axelrod worked with Biden in the Obama istration, though they didn’t cross paths from 2015 to 2018. When he saw Biden after that three-year gap, “he was stunned by how much the former vice-president had aged,” Tapper and Thompson report, though they fail to mention that they were unwilling to acknowledge publicly that they were also stunned when they saw the same thing Axelrod did.
-- Beginning in 2023 because “Biden had trouble pronouncing the names of world leaders, his staff began writing ‘President/Prime Minister of X Country’ rather than writing the leaders’ names on his notecards.”
-- In 2024, Biden said he had spoken with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the 2021 GT Summit, though Kohl had been dead since 2017. A few days later, he referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico.
-- In the 12 months preceding the June 2024 debate, Biden stopped holding Cabinet meetings and stopped seeing most congressmen.
-- In September 2023, at a fundraiser in Manhattan, Biden told the same story to the crowd within a space of three minutes, which Fox News reported as being an alarming occurrence, yet CNN made no mention of the incident.
-- Throughout 2023, U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., “saw that Biden’s communications problems indicated cognitive issues, and his fellow Democratic officials were in deep denial about this.” On Aug. 13, 2023, Phillips went on Meet the Press and said Biden should “ the torch to a new generation and not run for reelection.” Phillips turned out to be the only Democrat in Congress with the courage to publicly recognize Biden’s decline prior to the late June 2024 debate when it all became clear. The authors also lacked Phillips’ courage.
There are dozens more examples in the book. An occasional “senior moment” may not mean much, but a repeated, yearslong pattern makes it clear: Biden’s decline was obvious to those around him, the book reports, including these elite, well-sourced journalists who, for unstated reasons, failed to report what should have been the biggest story of their careers: a constitutional crisis and the possibility of needing to invoke the 25th Amendment. They essentially ignored the president’s incapacity until the fateful debate on June 27, 2024, when the whole world finally saw that, alas, the emperor was wearing no clothes.
Besides failing to apologize for their either missing or purposefully ignoring these glaring red flags in plain sight, they left out of the book three obvious examples of their own journalistic malpractice, two of which were hammered home by Megyn Kelly in her recent interview with Tapper.
It fails to mention an October 2020 interview in which Tapper denigrated Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump for her perceived audacity in claiming that Biden was in cognitive decline. It also ignores a one-on-one interview between Biden and Tapper 13 days after Biden had committed a widely-reported gaffe, asking about the whereabouts of the late U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Ind., whose death he had previously publicly acknowledged. Tapper failed to ask Biden about the glaring Walorski gaffe. Finally, the book is silent on Tapper’s early June 2024 criticism of a Wall Street Journal report that Biden was “showing signs of slipping.”
Almost six months before Biden’s debate meltdown, I co-wrote an op-ed in this newspaper with former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert in which we expressed our concerns about the then likely 2024 presidential nominees. Unlike Tapper and Thompson, we did not have many years of experience reporting on Biden from a media catbird seat. Nor had we held countless interviews with him. And yet, based on what we’d seen and read, we felt comfortable saying that the president “every day becomes more cognitively dysfunctional,” and “it doesn’t take long to watch him these days to see that he’s steadily losing horsepower and his mind and body’s downward slide is not reversible.”
Tapper and Thompson marvel in their book that in the aftermath of the June 2024 debate fiasco, “none of the Democratic officials now sounding the alarm had been willing to say anything when it counted,” and yet offer no explanation for why they failed the same test.
What happened with the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline during his presidency by the White House “Politburo,” his family, those few Democratic Party officials with access to him, and most of the left-leaning media pundits (including Tapper and Thompson), was not just an original sin. It was an unforgiveable sin for all of them to allow our national security to be controlled by “an elderly man with a poor memory” and Oval Office insiders answerable only to themselves.