Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson: Biden’s Decline and the Cover-up

“What the world saw at Joe Biden’s one and only debate was not an anomaly—it was not a cold, it was not someone who was under or overprepared, it was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an 81-year-old man whose faculties had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”
—Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

The 2024 presidential election was one of the most consequential elections in American history, yet it could have unfolded in a very different manner. President Joe Biden, who stepped down late in the campaign to make way for his younger vice president Kamala Harris, could have made that decision months earlier. Instead, surrounded by fierce defenders, Biden waited until the nominating conventions were already underway.

Two of America’s most respected journalists, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, have chronicled the behind-closed-doors actions and private conversations of those in Biden’s circles of family and advisers, revealing a more serious decline in the president’s mental acuity than was told to the American people—until they saw it for themselves in the one and only debate between Biden and Donald Trump in June 2024.

Biden and his closest advisers were convinced that only he could prevent a second Trump presidency, Tapper and Thompson say, something they feared so much the lied to themselves and others about the president’s condition and limitations.

It’s a story Tapper and Thompson share in their new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. They heard from White House staffers at all levels, congressional leaders and Cabinet members, governors, donors and Hollywood figures. They say President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seems shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents.