Review: ‘Original Sin’ indicts the ‘cover-up’ of a steeply declining Joe Biden

In December 2022, Jon Favreau, a co-host of the massively popular liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” took his family to visit the White House. Favreau, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama, had extensive connections within the Biden administration and brought his family along to visit his old stomping grounds. After a brief detour to say hello to a friend, Favreau went to his old office and was surprised to find President Joe Biden sitting there, charming his family. Not only that, the president had recognized Favreau’s mother-in-law from a fundraiser she had attended years earlier; he soon invited the whole group to the Oval Office, where he regaled them with a blow-by-blow account of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork’s failed confirmation hearings in 1987. The president’s staff seemed either blithely unaware that he was devoting a huge chunk of a weekday afternoon to story time or unwilling to intervene, but then again, Biden had always been a yapper.

In April 2024, Favreau visited the White House with his podcast co-hosts and several other “influencers” at a meet-and-greet the night before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Biden was incoherent and frail; he kept telling stories that no one could understand. Sixteen months had passed, but he seemed to have aged a half-century. An alarmed Favreau approached a White House aide, but his concerns were brushed off. The president was just tired, he was told. It was the end of a long week. There was no reason for concern. Two months later, Biden delivered the single worst performance in the 60-year history of televised presidential debates, dooming his reelection campaign, destroying his presidency and essentially delivering the country to Donald Trump.

Favreau’s experience was hardly unique. Far from it. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s account of Biden’s marked deterioration throughout his presidency, is littered with similar anecdotes. The result of more than 200 interviews, the book is a damning account of an elderly, egotistical president shielded from reality by a slavish coterie of loyalists and family members united by a shared, seemingly ironclad sense of denial and a determination to smear anyone who dared to question the president’s fitness for office as a threat to the republic covertly working on behalf of Trump. For years, they denied the president had any issues and kept him away from a public that had long since concluded that he was too old for the job. It worked for an astonishingly long time, until, very suddenly, it didn’t.

Of the many virtues of “Original Sin,” the greatest is its stubborn focus on Biden’s health as not just the most important factor in the 2024 election but the sole defining reason for Trump’s victory. “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election,” Tapper and Thompson write, “followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” “Original Sin” is not really a “campaign book” — its account of the 2024 election largely ends after Biden drops out — but its simple assessment of the race is more compelling than anything else I’ve read about it.

For Tapper and Thompson, Kamala Harris never had a chance. Had Biden announced he would serve only one term after the midterm elections in 2022, the party could have run a primary and selected a candidate who wasn’t saddled with the considerable damage of Biden’s administration — Gaza, inflation, the growing belief that he was simply no longer capable of being president. When Biden finally bowed to reality and announced he would no longer seek reelection, Harris was the only option and arguably the worst imaginable pick: Naturally cautious, she couldn’t break from the unpopular administration she belonged to. “Original Sin” is rarely better than when Tapper and Thompson are writing — with extensive reporting and clear-eyed prose — about the disaster that Biden caused. “No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error,” they write. “But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden.” Over the next year, dozens of books will appear that attempt to explain this election. It’s hard to imagine any doing better than that.

How Biden, Harris and the Democratic Party got there is a more complicated story. Tapper and Thompson pose three questions at the end of the book’s first chapter: “What was the extent of [Biden’s decline]? Who knew about it? Was it a conspiracy?” As with the provocative claim of a “cover-up” in the book’s subtitle, the invocation of Watergate is far from subtle. In any case, their extensive reporting speaks for itself: To answer those questions, they write, “We will let the facts speak for themselves.”

The facts certainly point to Biden’s staff having more strategically protected him from public view after the midterms, when he increasingly struggled to handle the basic duties of the presidency. If his mental state was bad, he was in just as rough shape physically — aides were reportedly mulling using a wheelchair to transport him if he won a second term.

As Biden’s decline worsened, one aide noted that his entire presidency changed. “Everything got shorter,” Tapper and Thompson write, “speeches, paragraphs, even sentences. The vocabulary shrank.” And yet, Biden was almost never confronted with evidence that he was faltering or that the public had determined he was unfit for the presidency. Biden’s family and a group of loyal aides who Tapper and Thompson call “the Politburo” were singularly devoted to the belief that Biden was uniquely capable of leading the country, and they went to great lengths to limit the president’s access to negative information to sustain it. The result was a political environment in which those who challenged the president’s standing, such as then-Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota), who mounted a quixotic primary campaign, were ostracized and a media environment in which few reporters were willing to question the president’s fitness for office. (Thompson was one of a handful of exceptions to the rule.)

You can fairly label that a cover-up — I would — but as far as conspiracies go, it’s hard to think of a less successful one. Before the end of Biden’s first year in office, a majority of voters had already concluded that he was too old to be president, a number that increased every year until, in the summer of 2024, it encompassed a sizable majority of the electorate. Given the realities of aging — there is no way for Joe Biden to get younger — this should have been alarming for Democrats everywhere. Some sources in the book plausibly tie Biden’s steep decline to the stress caused by his son Hunter, who spent the second half of his father’s presidency fighting several felony charges. It’s a claim that’s well supported in “Original Sin,” and it makes sense when you compare video footage of Biden in 2021 to Biden in 2024. The presidency undoubtedly took a huge toll on him — but he wasn’t exactly nimble when he first entered the White House. Even in the earlier clips, he’s still old, still shaky, still prone to fits of incoherence. Democrats surely noticed that Biden was old during the first two years of his term, but few raised concerns about his stamina — or the promise to serve as a “bridge” that implied he would only serve one term.

After the party outperformed expectations in the 2022 midterms, Tapper and Thompson report, “no Democrats in the White House or leaders on Capitol Hill raised any doubts, either privately with the president or publicly, about Biden’s second run.” Some were optimistic about their chances after the strong showing in the midterms; others were aware that speaking out would cause trouble: “Democrats knew that the White House watched closely for any signs of dissent. They kept quiet and went along.” But they should have known then that Biden, whose approval rating was hovering around 40 percent, was already doomed, thanks to a lethal combination of high inflation and growing concerns about his mental fitness.

As Biden’s deterioration increased in 2023 and 2024, several Democrats approached his staffers to inquire about the president’s fitness or his stubbornly bad poll numbers. “Original Sin” includes several iterations of the same anecdote: Whenever anyone raised a concern about Biden’s ability to handle the rigors of the presidency, they were told the same thing: Biden was not just fine, he was exceptional. Even if they had listened to those concerns, “Original Sin” argues, it was likely far too late to do anything about them.

Put another way, the emerging conventional wisdom that Biden entered a steep decline in 2023 may be accurate, but it ignores the fact that voters had come to a different conclusion far earlier — and were summarily ignored by Democratic politicians, who had plenty of time to act on their concerns and didn’t. It’s hard, moreover, to fault voters for concluding that Biden was unfit for office before the end of his first year. In “Original Sin,” there is evidence that Biden’s cognitive decline began all the way back in 2015, after the death of his son Beau, and that he required extensive help to conduct straightforward interviews during the 2020 election (he was often helped by being able to use a teleprompter, since so much of campaigning was done remotely during the COVID pandemic). The most troubling suggestion in Tapper and Thompson’s book is that Biden’s real original sin wasn’t running for reelection — it was running for the presidency in the first place.

“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 pp. $32

Alex Shephard is senior editor of the New Republic, where he has covered politics and culture since 2015. His work has also appeared in New York, GQ, the Atlantic, the Nation and other publications.