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People close to President Joe Biden hid the extent of his decline, new reporting shows. Free from fears that sharing the truth might help elect Donald Trump, they are finally coming clean to journalists. Had they spoken up earlier, maybe things would look different. A new book makes the argument that the 82-year-old’s refusal to address his waning capabilities or accept defeat was a critical factor in Trump’s path back to power.
Biden’s decline has long been apparent. As far back as 2019, his eye was bleeding during a televised town hall, and he was saying “look, fat” to an Iowa voter after challenging him to pushups. By early 2024, Biden was confusing the French president with a former French president who died in the 90s. The president was forced to drop out of the election last summer after a nightmarish debate performance against Trump revealed he was in terrible shape.
But the extent of Biden’s deterioration was not a major topic of reporting for much of his presidency — and his decline was actively covered up, according to CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.
Their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, uses interviews with more than 200 sources to show those close to Biden were trying to hide his plummeting cognitive abilities.
“What we found by writing this book is that everything that we saw going on in front of the camera was much worse behind the scenes,” Tapper told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in an interview published Saturday. The journalists’ longtime sources were much more forthcoming after the election when they no longer had to worry about hurting Biden’s or Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances.
It was clear to those around Biden that he was struggling. The people with access to the president shrank from the end of 2023 to 2024 as his decline became “precipitous,” as Thompson put it.
When he decided to run for reelection, there were people close to the president who didn’t think it was a good idea. But no one actually told Biden that another bid for office would be irresponsible. Thompson partly blames Biden for creating an atmosphere that discouraged dissent.
Tapper elaborated: “The point with Biden was such that I have never seen, until maybe the current administration — an administration where the president is so surrounded by people who will never tell him anything negative, ever, and in fact will block negative stuff from coming to him.”
Biden Cabinet members told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings were “disturbing and frustrating.” As early as 2021, meetings followed scripts. In 2022, he forgot the name of one of his top advisors, the journalists report.
October 2023 marked the beginning of what one Cabinet member called the “weird period,” where members of the Cabinet, with the exception of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, did not interact with Biden. One secretary who did manage to meet with Biden in spring of 2024 found him “mumbly and incoherent and difficult to understand,” Tapper said.
“But no one came forward,” Tapper said.” When they would complain internally, they were told, ‘He’s fine, be quiet.’”
One person who did speak out was actor George Clooney. Thompson and Tapper report that Biden didn’t recognize the movie star at the June 2024 fundraiser Clooney was co-hosting. Biden’s aide even told him “you know George,” which didn’t spark the president’s memory. The aide then said “George Clooney.”
“And then he’s, like, ‘Sure, yeah. Hey, how’re you doing?’” Tapper said. The incident prompted Clooney to write an op-ed in the New York Times where he argued that the Democrats needed a new nominee for president.
“No one has been able to point out where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or make a presidential address where he was unable to do his job because of mental decline,” a spokesperson told the New Yorker when they published an excerpt from the book detailing this incident.
And what if Biden had been reelected? People close to Biden think there would have been a constitutional crisis. Members of the Democratic party would have realized Biden was incapable of doing the job, and Biden’s inner circle would have refused to give up power.
“There is more to being president than not being Donald Trump,” Thompson said. “And I think that sort of speaks to the frustrating choice Democrats and the country faced in this last election. You had somebody who even members of his own administration believed was not up to doing the job he was running for, for four more years, versus someone who they sincerely believed was going to hurt the country in significant ways.”
