Excerpts and bits from Original Sin, an anecdote-filled journalistic tome written by Jake Tapper (CNN) and Alex Thompson (Axios) on “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” are making the rounds as the two authors conduct a promotional tour before its May 20th release. Some of the more noteworthy examples I’ve come across include:
One senior aide, who quit the White House because they did not think Biden should run, admitted to the authors that “we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”
Biden struggled to remember the names of top aides.1
Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, a top fund-raiser for Democratic Presidential candidates since the early eighties, attempted to help “fix” Biden by providing better lighting and trying to find a microphone that would amplify the president’s voice when he would break into whispers. Katzenberg even “recruited his friend Steven Spielberg, who helped coach Biden for the State of the Union and his debates, even assisting with routine campaign videos.”
When Biden proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious.2
Biden had to be repeatedly reminded that the movie star he was speaking with at a June 2024 fundraiser was his longtime friend George Clooney.3 Other high-dollar attendees described the president as “slow and almost catatonic,” so much so that it was “terrifying.”
The White House physician told Biden aides that the president would likely require a wheelchair during his second term.
More jaw-dropping nuggets can be found in this long piece published yesterday in the New Yorker by Tapper and Thompson.
I’ve written about the Biden potemkin presidency before. I hope you’ll forgive me for harping. But some things bear repeating, and it’s important to understand the enormity of what transpired. We’re talking about arguably the biggest scandal the presidency has ever seen,4 a scandal that runs to the core of what the presidency is supposed to be, and which risks the entire premise of executive government—that the commander in chief and not some shadowy, deceptive cabal is the sole elected decision-maker. The bottom line is Joe Biden spent pretty much his entire term in a state of such advanced senescence that he was borderline non compos mentis and periodically incapacitated.
Far from being an actual presidency, the previous administration was little more than a fraud perpetrated on the American people by scheming Svengalis who sent us careening from one international and domestic disaster to another while working overtime to frame the shameful dotage of our babbling Lear as a right-wing conspiracy. One is left reeling with anger at the near-criminal irresponsibility of all those involved, who, as far as we can tell, never paused to contemplate potential consequences for the country (and the world) because they were blithely focused on using America’s policy trough to promote Progress™ by slopping favors onto activist groups.
And the media was absolutely complicit in this Weekend at Bernie’s charade. I’m with Charles Cooke: “Don’t overthink it. They knew about Biden, just as we knew about Biden, and a supermajority of Americans knew about Biden. They lied about it, because they didn’t want Trump to win. That’s the story, the rest is noise.”
Mainstream presstitutes mortgaged their credibility because they believed a journalistic omertà would protect them. That belief resided on the presumption that their fellow journalists were all playing for the same team, a team comprised of partisans and ideologues with the same political goals as the party in power.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. The scandal isn’t that Democratic politicians feigned ignorance or just straight up lied to the public about their nominee’s cognitive decline because they wanted to win an election. (Disgusting, sure, but hardly surprising when you think about it.) The real scandal is that virtually the entire national press aided in that effort with the same goal. Even if you prefer the excuse being pushed by people like Tapper — that they were “duped” by White House lies, that the president and his political party colluded to suppress the ability of the sacred Fourth Estate to relay what might be conservatively termed a “matter of public interest” to voters — it’s still a massive scandal because the press promoted those lies without any skepticism at all, which everyone knows wouldn’t have happened if this had been a Republican administration.
But what a delicious dilemma to observe these hacks grapple with: either admit you knew about the sitting president’s decline all along and actively participated in the cover-up, or admit that you as a “journalist” were somehow completely blind to what we peasants knew beyond any shadow of a doubt.5
Which is it? Egregiously partisan-motivated benevolent incuriosity about Biden’s morbidly obvious decline, or appalling incompetence beyond all rational description? Either way, you’ve proven that your entire industry is functionally worthless and its credibility crisis is richly deserved.
Recall the media uproar when people pointed out that in the White House Situation Room, all of the name tags faced Biden instead of facing out from the speaker. Recall also when Biden referred to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as “the black man.”
Political commentator Stephen L. Miller repeatedly observed that the Biden videos released by the White House almost always included an absurd number of jump cuts, suggesting that the president could rarely read two sentences off a teleprompter without error in one take.
This was the fundraiser where Obama had to lead Biden off stage by hand. An Associated Press “fact-check” of the incident ran under the headline “Biden’s pause as he left a star-studded LA fundraiser becomes a target for opponents.”
A historical parallel that comes to mind is Edith Wilson’s concealment of her husband Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 stroke. She effectively acted as de facto president for the rest of his term, and her imperious incompetence resulted in failure to ratify Versailles and the destruction of Woodrow Wilson’s internationalist legacy.
As early as September 2021, Pew polling found that a majority of the public believed Biden was not “mentally sharp.” In May 2023, over a year before his disastrous debate performance, 62% of Americans surveyed by NPR/PBS/Marist said that Biden’s mental fitness was a real concern rather than just a political attack.
I've probably mentioned here before that my wife is friends with some pretty well-known NYT journalists, and it's hard to describe the abject terror they've been living in since the glory days of the Resistance. To say they live "walking on eggshells" would be an understatement.
They knew that even one awkwardly worded sentence that could have somehow been misconstrued by anyone anywhere at any time as helping the Orange Beast, if dredged up and plastered on social media, would result in an immediate and unappealable death penalty—and not just career death, but financial and social death, as they would be ostracized by all the Right Thinkers of brownstone Brooklyn. (My friend knows Alan Dershowitz's granddaughter and she was blackballed by all her friends in junior high once Dersh defended Donald. His granddaughter! Disinvited to every event!)
Our regime journalists were terrified of saying a single bad word about Biden, never mind revealing his senility, because they all knew that if Biden lost to Trump it might be pinned on one of them, thus their inherent conformity, status anxiety and survival instincts made telling the truth impossible.
They have destroyed their own credibility and put the lie to their self-flattering conceit as fearless defenders of democracy (lol), but they can and never will admit it, which is why this will be brushed under the rug.
Even if we accept for one second the absurd premise that hundreds or thousands of people whos job it is to pay attention to the president ALL missed this.
Why on earth would the media ATTACK the people who weren't missing it, and insist everything was just fine?
Wouldn't they....you know.....journalism? Figure out what the truth was and report that?
But they didn't, and we all know why.