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In June 2023, more than seven months before the first Democratic primary of the presidential election, the Daily Mail asked a thousand voters for a word to describe each of the announced candidates. In a resulting word cloud, the choice that completely dominated for Joe Biden was “old.” (For Donald Trump, by the way, the word was “criminal.”) This was not a fluke: ten weeks later, in August, a poll for the Associated Press found that 77 percent of adults and 69 percent of Democrats thought Biden was “too old to effectively serve another four-year term as president.” (A slight majority, 51 percent—but only 28 percent of Republicans—said the same of Trump.) A Wall Street Journal survey the next week also found that more than 70 percent of adults considered Biden “too old to run for president.” (Fewer than half said the same of Trump.)
Later, in February 2024, Robert Hur, a special counsel for the Justice Department, declined to prosecute Biden for what he found was willfully retaining (and using for a memoir) classified documents from Biden’s days as vice president. Having examined Biden at length under oath, Hur concluded that a jury would not convict him because he was “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” and that jurors would have reasonable doubt about any criminal intent.
There were other moments—a stumble here, a forgotten word there—captured by members of the political press, who called attention to the matter of Biden’s age. But by June 2024, when he fell into stammers during his debate with Trump, the world of politics expressed shock. Soon, Biden was driven from the race by members of his own party.
Now Original Sin, an eagerly awaited book from Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, combs through post-election interviews to offer the most detailed accounting yet of what the book’s subtitle calls the “cover-up” of Biden’s decline—a “cover-up” of something that the American people knew all along.
The authors of Original Sin say they spoke to hundreds of people for the book in the aftermath of the 2024 election, but I count only about a dozen sources who are named on the record saying they observed Biden’s cognitive decline before the debate. At least three Biden cabinet members provided quotes on Biden’s pre-debate debility, but none wanted to stand behind those quotes for the book.
To Tapper and Thompson’s credit, the named sources include two United States senators, Mark Warner of Virginia and Michael Bennet of Colorado, and six members of the House. None of these elected representatives told their constituents what they had observed at the time, however; all seem to have convinced themselves that a possibly incompetent Biden was preferable to a malevolent Trump—the same apparent calculation made by White House staffers. No one in the know in and around Washington reportedly thought that voters were entitled to make an informed choice.
There is considerable reporting in Original Sin, and a largely chronological narrative, but not much of a coherent story. The authors seem unable to settle on clear answers to some key questions, including: when Biden began to decline, as opposed to how much he just became more like himself, as we all tend to as we age; how much of the “cover-up” was just a reelection strategy of insulating the president, and how much an active subterfuge with malice aforethought; and whether Biden was simply aging or suffering from some serious illness (Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are mentioned as possibilities). Even granting that the book was rushed into print—the reporting began in November—these seem to be important gaps.
The matter of the timing of Biden’s decline looms as particularly important, of course. Original Sin posits that Biden was largely fine in an October 2022 interview with Tapper lasting fifteen minutes, and in managing a visit to Ukraine in February 2023. Yet it also makes a lot of his inability to remember the names of close associates—as he did in December 2022, when, in an encounter just outside the Oval Office, the book describes him calling Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, “Steve” and Kate Beddingfield, the communications director, “Press”—even as the authors note elsewhere that he had displayed the same recall difficulty with Mike Donilon, perhaps his closest aide, on at least one occasion in 2019, when everyone seems to think Biden was still in good shape.
The conditions that precipitated Biden’s problems, both physical and cognitive, are depicted in the book as having been linked to events with his sons. Hur, the special counsel, evaluated Biden by reviewing tapes produced in 2017 for a memoir and in a 2024 deposition; in his view, both recordings reflected a failing memory. The account in Original Sin, however, suggests that in 2017, Biden was overcome by grief in the wake of his son Beau’s death—but that he later bounced back, and years without impairment intervened.
The authors indicate their belief that Hunter Biden’s plea deal in June 2023 (later aborted) was an “inflection point” for the president, and that Hunter’s trial a year later triggered further decline. I was frustrated to find, though, that they do not come to grips with the implication of this timeline: that what the American people saw first were just physical limitations—the word cloud formed ahead of the “inflection point”—and that the White House staff might therefore have reached a reasonable initial judgment that concerns about Biden’s age were misplaced. (FDR, the greatest president of thetwentieth century, couldn’t walk upstairs or ride a bicycle.)
But even if preoccupation with Biden’s age was unfounded initially, it later was not. The villains of this book are clearly identified and repeatedly blamed. Leading the list are Donilon, legislative affairs chief Steve Richetti, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, and personal aides Annie Tomasini (to the president) and Anthony Bernal (to the First Lady). But the tight circle seems to remain unbroken: there are no smoking guns here corroborating an intent to mislead. Instead, the group, dubbed by the authors (and some junior aides) as the Politburo, lives in a world where, to the end, Biden remained a strong candidate and a fully effective executive.
The greatest disappointment of Original Sin is its lack of reflection on the performance of the press. Last month, at the annual dinner hosted by the White House Correspondents’ Association, Thompson accepted the group’s highest honor, recognizing his reporting on Biden’s decline. In a speech, Thompson acknowledged that even his own daily coverage had been less than it should have been. And he was right: of the pieces that earned him the award, only one was published before the debate. It was a curtain-raiser on Hur’s special counsel report, and made no significant mention of Biden’s age.
Thompson did publish one story focused on age, in late April 2023. It noted that Biden rarely scheduled events before 10am or after 6pm and often took weekends off from making appearances. Its theme was summed up this way: “Biden’s close advisers say he’s mentally sharp. But even some of them concede his age has diminished his energy, significantly limiting his schedule.” Thompson also included a passage that later became the central assertion of Original Sin: “Some White House aides privately have compared Biden to an aging king: He has a tight-knit palace guard of longtime aides whose first instinct is to protect him, and not take chances.”
What is not discussed is why the White House press corps, and their editor bosses, did so little to report out the question of Biden’s health in the ensuing year. At a fundraiser in September 2023, Biden repeated the same story within three minutes. Original Sin cites a New York Times reporter who was covering the event, and the incident was included in the pool report. The next day, Peter Doocy, of Fox News, asked at the White House briefing, “What’s up with that?” But the answer was plainly obfuscating, and neither he nor anyone else followed up.
The questions that needed to be asked seemed clear: To what extent did Biden remain the true decision-maker, as opposed to his staff? How much debate about serious problems did Biden personally entertain, and what did witnesses take away from his participation? How much, if any, reading did he do, upstairs, over the store, on an average night? How extensive were his comments, in writing or in meetings? How many of the words in speeches were his own? If he was sometimes too fatigued to work, what difference did it make? Had there been useful trips forgone? Important meetings not held or foreshortened? Did congressional or foreign leaders find him responsive or confused on phone calls?
Perhaps reporters tried, but precious few answers to questions such as these were published. Even today, most remain unresolved beyond a few anecdotes that may or may not be representative. Instead, many reporters satisfied themselves with how Biden appeared in their encounters with him—taking into insufficient account that they might have been permitted to see him only when he was at his best.
For instance, when Biden’s annual physicals did not include a cognitive test, ostensibly because his physician deemed it unnecessary, no one in the press corps seemed to have looked into the matter. Studies show that, even in people free from dementia, performance on cognitive tests tends to decline with age, particularly in people over eighty. It seems likely that Biden didn’t undergo a cognitive test precisely because it might have shown a diminished score, with potentially explosive political implications. Even now, the authors of Original Sin seem to have missed that point. (If you’re wondering about Trump’s supposedly “perfect” recent cognitive score as he nears seventy-nine, it should probably be weighed against the fact that past White House physicals of his appear to have misrepresented his height and weight.)
In one three-page chapter, Original Sin seeks to place Biden’s situation from 2023 to 2024 in the context of others in Washington who similarly declined at the end of long service. Tapper and Thompson name Reps. Kay Granger and John Conyers Jr. and Sens. Strom Thurmond, Dianne Feinstein, Thad Cochran, and Robert Byrd. Feinstein was the subject of significant press scrutiny (as Thurmond had been earlier)—though in general, the authors blame politicians who knew of these situations for failing to acknowledge difficult realities, not reporters for sparing coverage.
In June 2024, three weeks ahead of the presidential debate, the Journal did publish a story on Biden’s age. But of forty-five people with whom the reporters talked, all of the named sources casting doubt on Biden’s capacity were congressional Republicans. We will never know if the decision to publish without pressing for wider corroboration was the right one, as the disaster of the debate soon provided all the corroboration necessary. The last third of Original Sin charts what happened after that, but breaks no significant new ground.
Tapper and Thompson’s book is not the first this year to canvass the subject of Biden’s age. Two other volumes—more closely in the Making of the President tradition, pioneered in 1961 by Theodore White—have already appeared, and their contributions are worth noting. Both serve mostly, by comparison, to make Original Sin look stronger than it is.
The first of the year’s instant histories was Fight, from Jonathan Allen of NBC and Amie Parnes of The Hill. Fight begins with the June debate, and devotes its first seventeen pages to Biden’s decline. It adds yet another Democratic member of Congress to those who acknowledge having known of Biden’s debility, although in that case just weeks before the debate. A few unnamed Biden aides are quoted in conclusive fashion, but the moments of decline in Fight almost all take place in public, forming a perfect pattern in convenient hindsight.
Chris Whipple, a documentary filmmaker, has contributed Uncharted to the Making of the President pile. He, too, begins with the debate, but doesn’t seem to have any named sources with firsthand impressions of Biden’s decline leading up to that night, with the notable exception of Bill Daley, a former White House chief of staff (under Barack Obama) and cabinet member (under Bill Clinton), who also talked at length with Tapper and Thompson.
Whipple does quote Robert Caro, the historian, at a July 2023 Hamptons dinner party, where Caro predicted Biden’s forced withdrawal from the race. Whipple doesn’t seem to have asked whether Caro based that comment on firsthand observation or a hunch. Whipple also takes as evidence of Biden’s decline that the White House once offered him an interview only by email. Perhaps, but it could just as easily be the case that the staff considered the leader of the free world too busy to talk with a lesser-known book author.
Ultimately, Uncharted reaches the unsatisfying conclusion that “no one except Biden, his family and his doctors knew the truth about his condition.” Original Sin, to its credit, explodes that assertion. His close staff and family knew, and so did at least a few members both of Biden’s cabinet and of Congress.
The reluctance of reporters to ask the hardest questions continues, however, as these new volumes evidence. Polls today, for whatever they are worth, show that the Democratic presidential front-runner for 2028 is Kamala Harris. So I approached these books, among many other things, wanting to find out, in a version of Sen. Howard Baker’s famous Watergate question: What did the (vice) president know, and when did she know it? That question is not even addressed in Fight or Uncharted. In Original Sin, the answer does not come until page 299 of a 309-page narrative, and then comprises less than two pages. Harris is quoted as telling aides privately, “The times I saw him were mainly in the Oval Office or the Situation Room, and there was never a moment in those situations where I worried about his ability to be president.”
What do Tapper and Thompson make of this? “It could well have been an honest statement, given any vice president’s relatively limited interaction with a president on a daily basis,” they write. Seriously? No effort seems to have been made even to find out how many private meetings Biden and Harris had together in the critical year before the debate fiasco. If, say, the answer was even a modest four, is it really credible, given everything else reported in Original Sin, that Harris was left with no misgivings?
Joe Biden failed the country in deciding to seek a second term. But the press also failed in its job to confirm, in undeniable fashion, what the voters already knew. Unlike Biden, journalists will likely get another chance—and must do better.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated to clarify a reference to Biden in February, 2023.
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