Inside Joe Biden’s doomed run for re-election

As The New York Times puts it, Original Sin is “a damning portrait of an enfeebled [former US president Joe] Biden protected by his inner circle”.

What makes this book so fascinating, and has certainly made it so newsworthy, is the detailed account it gives of the long — painfully, tortuously long — time it took for Biden and his advisers to finally concede that he was too mentally feeble to stand for re-election in the poll that was due to take place on November 5 last year.

This made it almost impossible for Biden’s vice-president, Kamala Harris, to step into the ring in time to properly take on Donald Trump. With less than four months to mount and run a presidential campaign, the odds against her were overwhelming.

We will never know whether she — or possibly another Democratic candidate — might have trumped Trump had there been more time, as Biden’s failure to step aside timeously deprived his party of the opportunity to properly prepare for and conduct a winning campaign.

This book gives an insightful, convincing and exhaustive account of the dynamics inside the White House as the elderly president remained convinced that he could secure another term, and his close-knit team of advisers told him what he wanted to hear, failing to share the polling data that signalled that his prospects of retaining the presidency were slipping away.

“Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at-times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson argue.

“By holding their party and the country hostage until July 21, 2024 — the day Mr Biden announced he’d be dropping out — Team Biden handed the election to Mr Trump.”

There were many signs of Biden’s mental decline, but the president’s men and women lied and spun, cajoled and bullied, to play down the scale of his mental infirmity.

They would say he hadn’t slept properly, or he had a cold. Or, he had just had an exhausting flight. Nothing to worry about.

Biden’s decline was not a sudden shock. Tapper and Thompson suggest that people close to the president had seen the first signs he was deteriorating after the death of his much-loved son Beau in 2015.

“A senior White House official at the time told us that ‘parts of Biden’s brain and mental capacity seemed to dissolve like someone poured hot water on [them]’. Anyone who spent ten minutes with him when it was clear Beau was going to die in those last six to nine months could see it.” Others close to Biden noticed it too. “Beau’s death aged him significantly,” said a longtime Biden confidant. “His shoulders looked smaller. His face looked more gaunt. In his eyes, you could just see it,” we read.

Initially, it had seemed that Biden had intended to be a one-term president, but more than a year before the election he confirmed he was seeking a second term in the White House.

“Supported by his senior advisers and his wife and family, the oldest president in American history announced in April 2023 that he would run again. This meant potentially being president until he was eighty-six. The real issue wasn’t his age per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his presidency. What the public saw of the realities of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse,” Tapper and Thompson suggest. 

“Every president arrives at the White House with a team of loyalists, but by any historical standard, Biden’s inner circle was particularly insular. Not a lot of unwelcome light got through the cracks. The team solidified in 2015 amid Biden’s grief.”

The book looks at clues about Biden’s diminishing faculties, some of which came with the report by special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s handling of classified files after he had left the White House, where he had served as Barack Obama’s vice-president.

Interviews with him showed there was substantial evidence that he had wilfully and knowingly stored recklessly both marked classified documents and unmarked classified handwritten notes.

However, it also concluded that it would be impossible to prosecute Biden, due to the decline in his faculties.

“The prosecutors believed that a jury would see Biden ‘as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’. Prosecutors make calculations all the time about whether they can get a conviction. Some witnesses seem uncredible. Some victims might seem heartless. And some criminals might seem so addled that they’re entirely sympathetic,” say Tapper and Thompson.

There are also examples of Biden’s public appearances when there were serious concerns about his cognitive decline. 

Notably, there was his meeting with Hollywood star George Clooney at a fundraiser.

“It was obvious to many standing there that the president did not know who George Clooney was. ‘It was not okay,’ recalled the Hollywood VIP who had witnessed this moment. ‘That thing, the moment where you recognise someone you know — especially a famous person who’s doing a f***ing fundraiser for you — it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.’”

Then there was the D-Day commemoration in early June 2024, when Biden was said to look “frailer and was shuffling more than many of the World War 2 veterans who were nearing one hundred”.

However, it was the debate a few weeks later with Trump on June 27 that seems to have sealed Biden’s fate.

“What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at-times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.

“It was not just one bad night, as Biden and his team claimed in the aftermath. Millions were shocked by Biden’s unintelligible, slack-jawed performance at the debate.

“The original sin of election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment. And then came the June 27 debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world.”

Less than one month later — on July 21 — Biden announced he was standing down from the presidential race.

He had finally been given the awful truth about the polling and been warned what a crushing electoral defeat would do for his legacy.   

Biden’s frailty was again highlighted, just as Original Sin was being published, with the announcement that he has aggressive prostate cancer — accompanied by the barely credible suggestion that this elderly man was last screened for this disease in 2014.

Given the culture of half-truths and cover-ups that pervaded the Biden White House, and the highly resourced medical teams that were at the president’s disposal, many will suspect that the condition surely must have been diagnosed some years ago. If not, why not?

Original Sin is an important and timely book, and it makes a convincing argument that Biden clung on to the hope of re-election for too long and that many of those who should have rung the alarm bells about his decline stayed quiet or just lied about it.

While it is well written and researched, there are times when the detail becomes too much, and the vast cast of politicians and officials who populate the pages can begin to boggle the mind.

However, the recent scenes in the White House, when Trump ambushed President Cyril Ramaphosa and his team, and the erratic and economically illiterate trade policies of the current US president, show the consequences of the Biden cover-ups and his delay in standing down and making way for a more credible Democratic contender for last year’s US election.

Thanks to this book, it is now much clearer where the blame lies.