The Right’s Biden caricature – UnHerd

Joe Biden was born to be a politician. Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar and former Obama administration official, recently recalled nine different experiences with Biden or anecdotes he had heard over the years. Among these was the time in 2022 when he joined a meeting between Biden and Emmanuel Macron at the White House.

Sunstein imagined that Biden might not remember him, as they hadn’t seen each other in years. Yet Biden took Sunstein’s arm and recited his whole biography to the French President, including “details about my life that I only vaguely remember[ed].” But that was only a rare glimpse of a Biden who was no more. A younger Biden would have been able to assert leadership, make the case for his policies, and take arguments about his vision directly to voters. That is not the man we got. Rather, we ended up with a greatly diminished to barely functioning commander in chief.

Yet contrary to the cartoonish narratives of the Right, the debacle revealed not only the weaknesses of the Democratic coalition and mainstream media — but also some of their strengths.

Biden’s deterioration over the course of his presidency is a Shakespearean tragedy. His whole life, he enjoyed being around, and sometimes helping, other people. He finally achieved the position where he could best indulge his sociality and lift up his fellow citizens. Yet by then, Biden simply couldn’t function in the job, as recounted in Jake Tapper’s and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin.

The authors’ portrait of Biden shows a man who is still gregarious and optimistic. But he is unable to reliably go even minutes unscripted without embarrassing himself or causing political headaches. This forced Biden’s top aides to hide the once charming and charismatic politician from the media and the public as much as they could possibly get away with.

Throughout the process, however, there was always dissension within liberal ranks, and much of the media and Democratic establishment were just as fooled as members of the public. There are certainly villains in this story, but also some heroes. These are realities we cannot forget in the Trump era, when previously unthinkable levels of corruption and fealty toward one man have been normalized. 

Original Sin offers necessary background on Biden’s life, followed by a mostly chronological account of his downfall, covering his 2020 campaign through the end of his presidency. It is now clear that the problems that became so glaringly undeniable in the June debate with Donald Trump had been brewing long before Biden won the Democratic nomination. Those close to him trace his mental deterioration to the death of his son Beau from glioblastoma in May 2015, which was followed by Hunter’s downward spiral. 

The Hur Report, released in February 2024 after a probe into Biden’s mishandling of classified information, cited tapes from 2017 and described them as revealing “significant limitations” in Biden’s memory and speaking ability. During debate prep in 2019, Biden forgot the name of Mike Donilon, whom he had worked with since 1981. Tapper and Thompson speculate that if it hadn’t been for Covid preventing a traditional campaign that year, Biden would have shown himself unqualified and never become president. 

At one point, the campaign decided that the candidate would have a Zoom meeting with a group of Americans and then release the footage. Yet the product was unusable in the end, with one top Democrat sighing that Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Another Democratic figure told the authors that, even at that early point, it was clear there was no way Biden could be president. In the end, staffers were only able to release a few minutes of exchanges on the topics of racial justice and health care.

The Zoom debacle was one example of a half-decade-long effort to hide Biden’s shortcomings from the world. The presidency was an endless minefield. Those who led him through it were referred to internally as “The Politburo,” which was composed of Donilon, counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, and White House deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed, with other aides, such as Anita Dunn, just outside that innermost circle.

It fell on this group to constantly find ways for Biden to shirk his expected duties. Biden couldn’t pronounce the names of world leaders, so by 2021, staff would write out “President / Prime Minister of X country” on texts he was supposed to read. An organization would ask for a five-minute video from the President; but the White House would only produce one or two minutes, and even then, Biden would botch his lines.

There would be fundraisers at which a politician would normally be expected to deliver off-the-cuff remarks. But Biden aides would ask for a teleprompter setup and insist that the demand was nonnegotiable. The White House was in a constant state of crisis management, always ready to mislead journalists or go on the offensive to try to discredit reporters who raised uncomfortable questions about the President’s age.

What lessons are there to draw from this tragicomedy? The Right has a ready and predictable answer. Once again, the Establishment lied to us. There was an important fact about the world that the vast majority of the American people could see with their own eyes, and Democrats and their media allies wouldn’t acknowledge said reality for partisan and self-interested reasons. There is certainly some truth here. Original Sin makes apparent that things were much worse and for much longer than those of us on the outside had reason to suspect.

 “Democratic and media elites demanded some adherence to the rule of law and the idea of impartial justice.”

Yet to turn this into another elite-bashing narrative would be an oversimplification. Yes, there were real malefactors: Donilon, Richetti, Reed, and First Lady Jill Biden — not to mention the former President himself. They misled the public, and there should be reputational consequences for this. But there were also heroes, and ultimately, the party did push Biden out of the 2024 race.

We learn throughout the book that Democratic members of Congress and journalists had their own suspicions, which is why they were kept away from the President throughout his administration. Presumably, had they known how bad things were, the idea of Biden running again would have been untenable within the party much earlier.

Nonetheless, there was pushback even before the debate with Trump that ultimately led to Biden’s downfall. In June 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that behind the scenes, there was the widespread impression that Biden’s mind was slipping. Journalists added up the number of news conferences and interviews Biden had done, and told the world that he compared unfavorably to recent presidents. Ezra Klein used his position as a New York Times columnist and podcaster to take the remarkable step of calling for the President not to seek re-election — all the way back in February 2024. 

Then, too, Biden’s political, legal, and personal problems in large part stemmed from the fact that Democratic and media elites demanded some adherence to the rule of law and the idea of impartial justice. 

Hunter was put on trial in the summer of 2024, and members of the Biden family sat in the courtroom as they were publicly humiliated. The defendant had lied on his application for a gun by claiming that he wasn’t a drug user. The trial ended up drudging out the skeletons in the Biden family closet. The prosecution recounted how after Beau died, Hunter began an affair with his widow, introducing her to crack.

Hunter’s daughter Naomi took the stand and claimed that her father was progressing in his recovery when he bought the gun. But she was revealed to be lying when prosecutors presented texts showing that he was ignoring her pleas to get together around the same time he had given a drug dealer access to his bank account. Hunter was convicted — and still awaiting sentencing, along with a trial on tax-evasion charges — when his father pardoned him just after the election. 

Biden had the power to stop this at any point, but he chose not to. He could have pardoned Hunter earlier. Going back further, the President himself made the decision to keep Trump-appointed US Attorney David Weiss in his role as he was investigating his son. Biden could have stacked federal law enforcement with complete toadies like Trump later did through appointing figures like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel as top law enforcers.

The Hur investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents similarly required the President to take a hands-off approach throughout the process and refrain from exercising powers he technically had. It was even Biden’s personal attorney, Patrick Moore, who originally found classified documents stored in the President’s former office at the Penn Biden Center. Moore contacted Biden aide Bob Bauer — Anita Dunn’s husband, another one of the staffers responsible for hiding his condition from the world — who informed White House Counsel Richard Sauber.

This eventually led to an FBI investigation, and ultimately, Attorney General Eric Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter. From this came the Hur Report, which concluded that Biden likely violated the law but would be difficult to prosecute because a jury would have too much sympathy for him as an old man with memory problems, which provided fuel to those who questioned his mental capacity.

Needless to say, it is impossible to imagine any of this happening with Donald Trump. 

I have yet to meet a single Trumpian who disagrees with the proposition that Trump would have ever let one of his sons be prosecuted. This isn’t simply because Biden is more personally ethical than Trump, although that is likely true. Democratic elites and the media care about the rule of law, about maintaining fundamental norms, as can be seen in the ways in which law enforcement caused headaches for Biden and his family even as he was in control of the executive branch.

Republican and conservative elites don’t care nearly as much about legal procedure. At least, not under the current populist dispensation. They complain about the politicization of the justice system and corruption among Democrats, and then look the other way as Trump doesn’t even pretend that the DOJ and FBI should operate independent of his personal will; encourages people to send him bribes through purchasing his meme coin; and sits back as his sons strike real-estate deals with foreign governments that he directly benefits from.