The Media’s Original Sin
The new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson reveals the press’s role covering up Biden’s decline.
Drew Holden is managing editor at American Compass
Original Sin, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s (formerly Politico’s) Alex Thompson, recounts the cover up of Biden’s undoing told through the stories of those closest to him, dating back to before he ran and won the presidency in 2020.
The book is a dishy tell-all, a Beltway drama about what went on behind closed doors in and around the White House. How could someone so incapacitated seek a second term in the Oval Office? Who let things get so bad? “Everyone saw it happening,” the authors note, and recognized that what was happening with Biden “wasn’t normal.” Why wasn’t it stopped?
But that narrative ignores a key element of the cover-up: the role of the mainstream media they’re both leading voices in.
The authors seem to ask these questions as if they’re as confused as anyone who saw Biden on that fateful debate stage in June 2024. But that narrative ignores a key element of the cover-up: the role of the mainstream media they’re both leading voices in.
The authors frame this tawdry tale as the story that led up to Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024 against now-President Donald Trump. Most readers likely remember the event: a deflated Biden, hard to hear, puttering around the stage, looking lost, unable to finish a sentence.
His seeming mental incapacity was “not an anomaly,” the book’s jacket declares, but “the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years” being allowed on the stage.
The book walks through the accomplices that allowed him to get there—starting with Biden’s inner circle, dubbed the “Politburo,” including close aids Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, Bruce Reed, and Anita Dunn, as well as his wife, Jill, and other family members. The collection of true believers refused to accept that the president was declining, and fought tirelessly to get White House staff, elected Democrats, the media, and the American people to believe likewise.
Biden’s White House leadership team is described as a ruthless and cynical presence; a pit of vipers working tirelessly to concoct and defend the illusion that Biden was “the same as ever.” They limited not only what information about Biden could be released to the public, but what information from the public would be communicated to Biden himself. They operated as a guard for the president against voter concerns and criticisms.
The broader conspiracy also includes witting Democrats afraid to tarnish the legacy of the leader of their party. There’s the higher-level point: countless elected officials saw Biden in a state of decline and held their tongues as he nominally acted as the commander in chief and sought another term he wasn’t capable of serving.
There’s the higher-level point: countless electeds saw Biden in a state of decline and held their tongues as he nominally acted as the commander in chief and sought another term he wasn’t capable of serving.
But there are specific indictments worth mentioning of elected officials who were willing to share their alarm in private but, in public, assured voters that everything was fine.
In the fall of 2023, Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison is reported to have had a bizarre interaction where the president who had appointed him couldn’t recognize him, freezing up while shaking his hand. Around the same time, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner is reported to have thought that Biden’s “aging issues” were undermining his political decision making around Guantanamo Bay detainees, problems “he felt were becoming visibly apparent to anyone watching.” Harrison vigorously defended Biden’s capacity right up until he dropped out of the race. Warner would go so far as to say it was “time for conversations about the strongest path forward” on a nominee, but abandoned efforts to rally Democrats to push for an alternative.
At a meeting of congressional leadership in January 2024, Biden is described as having “listlessly read bullet points out of a binder,” in a display that sources in the room described as a “shitshow” and “difficult to hear.” Unnamed Democrats described Biden as drifting off and abruptly losing his train of thought. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the time described Biden as “incredibly strong, forceful, and decisive” in that meeting. Even after the fateful debate, Jeffries defended Biden on the top of the ticket.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is described by the authors, ahead of the 2024 debate, as concerned. Biden would “call him and forget why he’d called. Sometimes he rambled. Sometimes he forgot names,” speaking like Schumer’s mother, “who had Parkinson’s.” Schumer is described as holding back his worries at the time. He spent 2024 claiming that Biden’s “mental acuity is great … it’s as good as it’s been over the years.”
Much of this dishonesty was delivered to rebut concerns the general public had based on Biden’s appearance. Polls showed everyday Americans concerned about Biden’s age and cognitive ability. Off-hand remarks by staffers “tried to convince their skeptical friends and family members that Biden was in command.”
All of it boiled down to a fear—soon realized—that if the American people could see the real Joe Biden, they’d hand the country to his 2024 rival, Donald Trump.
Throughout the book, the role of the press is mentioned mostly as victims of the White House and Democrats’ deception. That refrain has been repeated during the authors’ book tour; the media, like the American people, were misled. Sure, maybe they dropped the ball on Biden—maybe, as Thompson would tell the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, part of the problem was that the press had “missed the story.”
In the authors’ note before the story itself begins, the motivation behind the reporting is explained. “Our only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023-2024,” the authors intone. It ends with a quote from Orwell, about how “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
But the media weren’t simply duped, unable to see what was right in front of them. A close reading of the reporting at the time makes clear that the press played an active role in covering up Biden’s decline—right until it was no longer politically beneficial to the Democrats to do so. Through it all, Tapper and Thompson—and the rest of their fellows in America’s mainstream media—were acting no differently from the Democrats they point to as the guilty parties.
A close reading of the reporting at the time makes clear that the press played an active role in covering up Biden’s decline—right until it was no longer politically beneficial to the Democrats to do so.
The book walks through a series of episodes that highlighted how Biden’s mental acuity and physical stamina had collapsed, as well as evidence of Team Biden using the machines of the state to deceive voters for Biden’s political interest.
But the same cowardice shown by Democratic officials, the same unwillingness to confront reality by Biden’s inner team, all the horrifying elements of the cover up were repeated in how Tapper, Thompson, and the rest of the media covered these stories in real time.
Tapper himself described the idea that Biden was exhibiting cognitive decline in 2020 as a conspiracy theory. Following a damaging report on Biden’s cognitive abilities in February 2024, Tapper brought former Biden communications director Kate Beddingfield on to rebut the report’s supposed “editorializing.”
Days later, Tapper didn’t object when Rep. Rho Khanna claimed Biden was “completely mentally sharp,” in response to a question of whether the White House should be more aggressive in combatting age concerns. Tapper then asked a Democratic consultant about how to deal with the optics of “the age issue.”
Following a critical report from the Wall Street Journal on Biden’s cognitive ability in June, Tapper highlighted the “critical nuance” in the piece and brought on Sen. Chris Coons—perhaps Biden’s most outspoken defender, according to Original Sin—on the program to “defend Biden.”
Thompson was the more honest of the two throughout. He recounts how Biden’s staff lashed out at him for telling the truth about Biden’s team constraining his working day to only a few hours to accommodate his decline in 2023. The rest of the media was more accommodating. At the same time, the New York Times trumpeted just how vigorous Biden was, according to his aides. Biden was “sharp and commanding” (“in private,” of course) and often “displayed striking stamina,” outpacing even his own, younger, staff.
Efforts to defend Biden only increased from there. The year leading up to the 2024 election saw countless examples of the media working to obscure or write off evidence of Biden’s decline.
The year leading up to the 2024 election saw countless examples of the media working to obscure or write off evidence of Biden’s decline.
In February 2024, a special counsel who had been investigating Biden for mishandling documents, Robert Hur, issued a scathing report on Biden’s acuity decline. Hur said that although Biden had broken the law, he couldn’t bring charges because no jury would think Biden knew what he was doing. He described the former president as likely to be seen as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Tapper and Thompson highlight Biden’s “media allies” at openly partisan MSNBC and the New Republic expressing outrage in defense of the president. Left unsaid was that mainstream reporters like the two of them and outlets did the same.
Tapper’s CNN blamed the allegations against Biden in part on “ageism,” and concluded Hur was out of line to say Biden had declined: that would require an expert. Reports from Washington Post and the Associated Press both likened Biden’s memory failure to anyone mixing up the names of their children. The New York Times ran a headline claiming “memory loss requires careful diagnosis, scientists say.” And even then, NBC News announced, memory difficulty “doesn’t affect decision making or judgement,” according to “brain experts.”
The following month, the Biden administration and Democrats orchestrated the release of a redacted transcript of the interview right before Hur’s congressional testimony on the report. Even though it was provided by the administration itself, the press dutifully leapt to claim it exonerated Biden and indicted Hur.
Tapper’s CNN colleague Oliver Darcy spiked the football on the whole story, attacking outlets who had expressed concerns initially. The media bedwetters “breathlessly questioning” Biden’s capacity when Hur’s report first came out should’ve waited to weigh in because the transcripts “indicated that Biden appeared fairly sharp.” The first paragraph of the story—“Oops?”—is perhaps a better description of the newly released Hur tapes revealing Biden’s cognitive shortcomings at the time.
The sentiment was the same across the media. The Washington Post went so far as to claim the redacted transcript “undermines some key GOP claims on Biden,” who “doesn’t seem as absent-minded” as reported. Beyond one flub, Biden appeared “clearheaded,” according to the New York Times. The Atlantic said Hur’s misleading narrative “reinforced conservative propaganda.”
The authors seem to remember the events differently, noting only that, as a result of the White House’s deception and refusal to comment, “most news media coverage thus did not acknowledge the president’s long, rambling answers; the troubling lapses of memory; and the disruptions in his thought process.” Why it was that the media, in Tapper and Thompson’s telling, needed political permission to do so remains unaddressed.
The media’s deceptive efforts to defend Biden reached a crescendo a few months later, when Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dubbed an avalanche of often-accurate videos of Biden appearing confused or incapacitated as “cheapfakes.” The press were quick to pick up the phrase.
It came to a head at the G7 Summit in Normandy. “Biden’s deterioration may never have been so obvious before a global audience as it was during the D-Day commemoration in June,” the authors write. One odd moment stood out to attendees: “Biden, while in the midst of sitting, froze for a second… It appeared he’d made the calculation that the physical difficulty of standing up and then sitting back down wasn’t worth it, hence he froze in place.” France’s president reportedly said he was embarrassed for Biden. Conservatives pounced.
But the media saw it differently. Here, again, were the “cheapfakes.”
The New York Times decried the “distorted, online version” of Biden that conservatives kept criticizing and inflaming with “misleading” videos “lacking context.” Tapper’s CNN said the videos were “deceptively cropped” to “misleadingly claim Biden wandered off.” “Seeing is believing?” the Associated Press asked, “not necessarily when it comes to video clips of Biden.”
The Washington Post lamented that the spread of the video indicated “how the politics of misinformation and conspiracy theories do not stop at the waters’ edge.” ABC News and other outlets called in the fact-checkers to dispute the videos.
Biden traveled from that trip to a fundraiser studded with Hollywood elite raising money for the president’s campaign. The authors unfold a harrowing and horrifying tale of a man in serious decline: guided by the arm by an aide; looking like “someone who was not alive,” one source recalled; and unable to recognize George Clooney. Attendees “expressed concern” about “the president’s apparent diminishment.” Again, conservatives seized.
An attentive reader may remember this moment of press coverage, too.
“Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate,” a headline at Tapper’s CNN declared. A Washington Post piece about the “cheapfakes” phenomenon—the videos of which the paper gave its most offending fact-check designation (Four Pinocchio’s)—said that part of the reason we could know a linked video was fake was because Biden “has often said he doesn’t dance.” The Associated Press’s misinformation debunker said “the facts” disputed those suggesting “Biden is mentally and physically unfit for office.”
That pattern held up until the debate in late June, where Biden’s decline was beamed into the rooms of millions of Americans.
After the debate brought the house of cards down, the book descends into a multi-day drama of Democratic elected trying to find the resolve to tell Biden to drop out.
Now that it was apparent Biden couldn’t beat Trump, the press found the moral courage to say the sorts of things that could endanger Biden’s status on the top of the ticket.
In that effort, Democrats were supported by a similar course correction from the mainstream media. Now that it was apparent Biden couldn’t beat Trump, the press found the moral courage to say the sorts of things that could endanger Biden’s status on the top of the ticket.
When it became apparent that Biden imperiled Democrats’ chances down-ballot in 2024, outlet after outlet came out with devastating takes about Biden’s long-apparent decline. Just weeks after the “cheapfakes” criticisms, the Washington Post ran a headline, “Biden’s aging is seen as accelerating; lapses described as more common.” The subhead reveals that “in recent months” “aides, foreign officials, members of Congress, and donors” reported Biden “seemed slower and more often loses his train of thought.”
“Biden lapses are increasingly common,” a New York Times headline confirmed. ABC reported on guests noticing “troubling” signs the month prior.
Elected Democrats, likewise, finally got the political gumption to act, the author’s recount, after reading a compelling op-ed from George Clooney calling on Biden to step aside.
In that way, the story of Biden’s eventual off-staging is a story of catching up to reality not much different from Original Sin itself. Now that the dust had settled, it was safe to say the truth known all along.
In the final chapter, “Conclusions,” the authors give voice to a number of experts about what might underly Biden’s decline. Suggestions from dementia to Alzheimer’s and beyond are floated by leading, unnamed neurologists. That follows a discussion of invoking the 25th Amendment—the removal of a president incapable of fulfilling the job.
But how could we stop a repeat of what happened with Biden? How can we ensure that the public gets the information it needs? Could it be a vital role of a free press? The chapter, after all, opens with a discussion of Watergate. Maybe the media, shocked at its collective failure to cover Biden, could be the answer? Maybe after all of the reporting, Tapper and Thompson would offer a prescription to their media fellows for how to better cover elected leaders’ propensity for hiding unpleasant truths? Instead, the book ends with the suggestion of a law about presidential cognitive tests, which the authors argue would ensure the “president can be counted on to be fully open.”
Maybe the expectation that the president the media counted on would be “fully open” on such matters was the problem all along, their new efforts to retcon the recent history notwithstanding.