Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are going to make a lot of money from their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Some people find this aggravating, and for good reason. The vast majority of Americans (86 percent as of February 2024) used common sense to arrive at the correct conclusion long before the 81-year-old president shuffled on stage and bragged about beating Medicare. Biden was cognitively and physically unfit to serve another term in office. No shit. He was arguably unfit to serve at all. The scandal played out in plain sight, fueled by Democrats and mainstream journalists doing what they do best: scolding the American people for having the wrong opinions.
“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 write in the introduction. It’s a carefully worded admission that their goal is not to provide a full account of the cover-up of Biden’s decline, because that would involve a thorough examination of how mainstream journalists, who don’t officially work “in the White House” or on behalf of Democratic campaigns (but often in practice), helped perpetuate the lies.
Original Sin is an illuminating and often infuriating exposé. It’s packed with damning accounts from (mostly anonymous) Democratic sources who all waited until after the election to stop lying. Numerous villains are identified: Biden himself, his family, his inner circle, and the Democratic establishment. Meanwhile, the reporters who failed to expose the scandal when the stakes were higher are generally portrayed as sympathetic, well-meaning professionals with poor bullshit detectors.
“Many reporters took the White House denials at face value,” the authors write. Yes, we know. But why? Are journalists just lazy? Incompetent? Was there some other reason so many of them were so willing to parrot Democratic talking points that defied credulity? While promoting the book last week, Thompson explained that even the people orchestrating the cover-up were shocked at how easy it was to manipulate the self-anointed “guardians of democracy” in the press. “We were sort of amazed at some of the stuff we were able to spin reporters on,” the source said. “You guys should not have believed us so easily.” This quote does not appear in the book. It should have been the opening line.
The authors are relatively unsparing when conveying the extent to which the Democratic Party went along with the charade. They interviewed numerous (mostly anonymous) donors, politicians, and party leaders who witnessed Biden’s decline, which often reminded them of relatives who suffered from Parkinson’s or dementia. They kept their mouths shut because they didn’t want to piss off “The Politburo,” the inner circle of longtime Biden aides who were essentially running the country while the nominal president was “at best a senior member of the board.” Everyone was afraid of Jill Biden, who ruthlessly snuffed out dissent with the help of her reviled henchman, Anthony Bernal, described by some as “the worst person they had ever met.” An anonymous donor, who saw a feeble Biden fail to recognize a former longtime aide in August 2023, tries to rationalize their inaction. “We weren’t going to change that he was running, and no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win,” the donor says. “So no one said anything. No one wanted to hear it, and if you said anything, you got your head chopped off.”
Others shrugged it off because they didn’t really care if Biden was fit to serve as long as he had a chance of beating Trump. “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while,” said a longtime Biden aide granted anonymity to admit fraud. Another motivating factor was the general agreement among party elites that Kamala Harris, the most likely alternative, was even less capable than a walking corpse. For some of the key players, it’s unclear what they were thinking at the time, but they’re still lying about it now. According to the authors, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who often sat in for Biden at meetings with foreign leaders and helped translate his incoherent ramblings when he did show up, claims to have “continually witnessed the president fully able to meet the moment” right up to the debate with Donald Trump. The contents of Original Sin (and common sense) suggest this is some ass-covering bullshit.
When it comes to the media’s role in the cover-up, there is no serious attempt to explain why so many journalists were such willing participants. The motivations were likely the same: fear of losing access, fear of losing to Trump, and so on. There is one brief passage in the book about a mystery reporter from a “national news outlet” who scrapped a story on Biden’s decline in 2024 after White House counselor Steve Ricchetti berated her over the phone. He threatened to wage a full-scale assault on her credibility, and the reporter caved. The authors clearly view Ricchetti, not the weak-kneed journalist, as the uniquely villainous main character in this episode, as if every White House didn’t act this way. To paraphrase Donald Trump: When you’re a Democrat, they let you do it. Most readers will wonder about all the other journalists who were bullied into submission, cowed from speaking truth to power, and why there’s only one example in the book. (There are definitely more.)
It’s maddening, really. Go back and watch the tape of Tapper insisting (without evidence) that Biden was mentally “sharp” in September 2023. We know now that in the preceding months, Biden had turned in a series of awful performances at fundraisers that left some donors worried that he “might not make it to Election Day.” This was around the time, the authors reveal, that a handful of unnamed Biden aides became convinced the president was too braindead to serve another term. They started leaking stories about Biden’s limitations to Thompson, who was one of the only mainstream journalists to report on Biden’s decline. Was Thompson the only reporter these aides ever contacted? Almost certainly not. What happened? In June 2024, Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes of the Wall Street Journal published a story on Biden’s decline. As promised, they were instantly denounced as right-wing fabulists—not just by White House aides and other Democrats. Many so-called journalists joined the pile on, including Tapper’s former CNN colleague Oliver Darcy, who slammed the Journal‘s (accurate) reporting for “playing into a GOP-propelled narrative that the 81-year-old president lacks the fitness to hold the nation’s highest office.”
Tapper’s response to the Journal story was also in line with White House talking points. He echoed Darcy’s concerns about the sourcing, while noting that the paper was owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch. He interviewed one of Biden’s most ardent supporters, Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), who slammed the media for obsessing over “minor slips” that were “typical of anyone who’s keeping a demanding 14 hours a day schedule.” That wasn’t true, but Tapper quickly changed the subject to Taiwan. Last week, Megyn Kelly asked the CNN host why he didn’t invite Linskey and Hughes on his show to discuss their reporting. Tapper’s defensive response was positively Bidenesque. “I don’t know what the booking situation was,” he said. “Megyn, if we’re gonna do this, let’s just stick to the facts here, OK?” Ahead of the book’s release, Tapper went out of his way to praise the “heroic reporters” and denounce the “smear campaign” against them. How gracious of him.
The Original Sin rollout feels like a coordinated public relations campaign, because it is. To prepare for the book launch, Tapper hired a crisis communications expert who advised his former colleague, Zoom masturbator Jeffrey Toobin, and his former boss, Jeff Zucker, who juiced the network’s ratings by promoting charismatic scumbags such as Andrew Cuomo and Michael Avenatti before being forced out in 2022 for concealing a romantic relationship with a subordinate. It was a clever move, not only because Tapper is a notoriously thin-skinned hack, but because CNN and other mainstream outlets are struggling to overcome a very real (and self-inflicted) crisis. It was also a clever move for Tapper to team up with Thompson, who joined CNN as a paid contributor in August 2024. Unlike his coauthor, Thompson maintains a modest degree of credibility when it comes to (gently) criticizing the media’s failure to expose the truth, which he did at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner earlier this year. Just not in his best-selling book.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Penguin Press, 352 pp., $32
