"At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?
President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again...
 |
| Source:The New Yorker with a look at Jake Tapper's & Alex Thompson's book about President Biden. |
If you are a paid subscriber to The New Yorker, you can see the rest of this article at
The New Yorker
From Penguin Random House:
"In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.
Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.
Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem 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. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.
The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump's return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading...
From The Guardian:
"A press release by Penguin Random House says Biden, “his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations.
white man wearing navy suit and light blue shirt sitting on a light yellow chair looks up with his hand raised
Biden’s health and threat of a second Trump term loom over Nato summit
Read more
“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for re-election seem 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,” it goes on to say.
Tapper served as a moderator for the infamous presidential debate in June 2024 hosted by CNN in which Biden’s poor performance essentially ended his campaign. After intense scrutiny on his mental acuity and age, Biden announced his decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorse Harris a few weeks later.
“Toni Morrison once said, ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,’” Tapper said in a statement to CNN Business. “That’s what inspired this book: we wanted to know more about what we all just lived through. More than 200 interviews later, Alex and I have a much better idea. And soon you all will too.”
From Chris Cillizza:
"In this video, Chris Cillizza reacts to revelations from the upcoming book "Original Sin" by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, which claims that senior White House aides deliberately shielded President Joe Biden from even his own staff starting in 2023 due to concerns about his mental and physical decline. Cillizza highlights a striking quote from a former aide who quit over Biden's decision to run again, calling it a "disservice" to the country.
Cillizza argues this goes beyond political strategy—it was a cover-up that withheld critical information from the public, media, and even parts of the administration. While acknowledging that Biden is no longer president, Cillizza insists the lack of transparency is damaging to American democracy, and draws a parallel with Donald Trump’s limited disclosure of his medical records. He calls for accountability from Democratic leaders and stresses the need for honesty from public officials, regardless of party."
From what I wrote about this story back in December:
"Remember then citizen Joe Biden promising not to run for President in 2020:
"Former Vice President Joe Biden’s top advisers and prominent Democrats outside the Biden campaign have recently revived a long-running debate whether Biden should publicly pledge to serve only one term, with Biden himself signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term.
While the option of making a public pledge remains available, Biden has for now settled on an alternative strategy: quietly indicating that he will almost certainly not run for a second term while declining to make a promise that he and his advisers fear could turn him into a lame duck and sap him of his political capital.
According to four people who regularly talk to Biden, all of whom asked for anonymity to discuss internal campaign matters, it is virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.
“If Biden is elected,” a prominent adviser to the campaign said, “he’s going to be 82 years old in four years and he won’t be running for reelection.”
Even by October, 2023, it would've been too late for President Biden to drop out. But it would've been better than dropping out 6 months ago:
"Bill Maher called on Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential election, saying the 80-year-old incumbent is too old to run for president and likened him to the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The host of “Real Time with Bill Maher” mocked Biden on Friday night, describing the president as the “only democrat who can lose to Trump,” despite the men only having a four-year age difference.
“Someone has to convince President Biden that if he runs again, he’s going to turn the country back over to Trump and go… down in history as Ruth Bader Biden, the person who doesn’t know when to quit and so does great damage to their party and their country,” Maher said, referring to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Ginsburg notoriously decided to not retire during the Obama administration when she could have been replaced with a liberal justice, only to die at the age of 87 in September 2020 during the Trump administration."
I don't agree with comedian Bill Maher on everything. But when he's right, he's damn right. (You put that stronger) And he called it in October, 2023:
"The issue with President Biden isn’t if he will be replaced - it's who will replace him."
To put it simply: if President Biden announced let's say by April, 2023, that he promised not to run for reelection in 3-1/2 years a go to assure voters that he would pass the torch (so to speak) and because it was time "for a new generation of leadership", the Democratic Party would've had a full primary season and Vice President Kamala Harris probably wins the nomination anyway. And she would've been my preferred candidate right out of the gate. And all those townhalls, those debates, those TV interviews, that she didn't want to do this summer and to a certain extent this fall, all those things would've been taken care of during late 2023 and early 2024.
And it's not just that President Biden broke his promise not to run for reelection. It's why he did that is even worst, his lack of reasoning for it. He made it about the economy and that he was the only person up to task of bringing down the high cost of living. When the fact is he knew damn well that his background as a public servant is not economics. He made his carer in Congress as a foreign policy and national security expert. As well as criminal justice and the Constitution. Not economic policy...
From what Ederik Schneider wrote about this in April:
"But as Erik Schneider said, had President Biden simply kept his promise to to a one-term President and announced like in April of 2023, that he wasn't running for reelection, he might not have been an issue in 2024, at all. Because whoever the new Democratic nominee would be, that person would have had about a year or so to introduce themself to the country and lay out exactly what they want to do as President and not have to worry about what the President thinks of their agenda. And Vice President Harris might have won the nomination anyway.
We'll never know this because the people around the President, who knew he was struggling mentally and had low energy, didn't have the courage, the character, to either tell the President that he shouldn't run for reelection and why, or at the least leak what they know about his physical and mental conditions, or resign and go public with what they know about him.
You think Democratic donors would've been backing the President the way they did, financially, up until his debate, if they knew he was struggling to remember names of people he knew very well, struggling just to get through his work schedule, physically, getting stuck in-between thoughts when trying to speak? Of course not. If they knew this 2 years ago, if the public knew as well, the Democratic leadership, even, would've called for the President not to run for reelection...
And from what I wrote about this last Thursday:
"So I give President Biden credit for at least acknowledging that he's somewhat responsible for the American nightmare (also known as President Donald Trump) returning to The White House as President again. Rare, if ever, that you even hear a former politician take any responsibility for anything that goes wrong on his or her watch, especially when they're an executive. It's like seeing people jumping out of air conditioners, flying rattlesnakes with wings... you almost feel like you have to be high on meth to see any of those things. Especially even a former politician take any responsibility for anything bad happening on their watch, especially an executive. So I give President Biden credit for that.
But the problem here is (and you can rewatch the interview with The View) it's what he's taken responsibility for. He's taking credit for doing all these things like the infrastructure, the research and development, the prescription drugs, the jobs and economic growth, etc. But the only problem was (according to President Biden) that these benefits come later before Americans can feel them and his administration (perhaps including the President) didn't do a good enough job of selling the benefits of what they were doing.
So on 1 hand President Biden is taking responsibility for the fact that he was too unpopular to even run for reelection, but then he's sort of qualifying that concession by saying it's the voters fault for not seeing the benefits if what he and his administration were doing. But that's more than Donald Trump would give you when he screws up, or any other crooked politician...
Just to throw something else in (in case there's an inch of space left in this post's trunk): So about 1/2 hour ago, maybe an hour (I wasn't looking at a watch or a clock when I saw this) MSNBC anchor Katy Tur was interviewing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Back in the summer of 24, Leader Schumer was still the Senate Majority Leader. And she pulled a quote from Jake Tapper's and Alex Thompson's book about Leader Schumer trying to convince President Biden to drop out of the presidential race, back in July. And apparently Leader Schumer told the President:
"If you stay in this race, you'll not only lose, but you'll throw away the work that you've done and everything that you accomplished the last six years". And apparently the President, who is 1 of the quickest-witted, and most frank American politicians that we've ever had (at least before he became President) responded to Schumer by saying:
"You have the biggest pair of balls that I've ever seen". She used the word "kahunas", but the point was made. And Katy Tur asked the Minority Leader, what he thought about that.
You don't serve 44 years in Congress, the last 8 as Senate Democratic Leader and 10 years before that as chief political strategist, and Senate Campaign Committee Chairman, for the Senate Democrats, if you don't have "skillz". (To use a hip hop expression from the 1990s)
Leader Schumer responded to Katy Tur's question by saying:
"We're about to see the largest cuts to Medicaid in the history of this program in this Congress. Right now I'm focused on defeating that bill. I'm focused on the future, not the past." The old artful political dodge. There was a bell going off in the lobby on Capitol Hill, that's right between the House and Senate chambers and Katy Tur said something like: "I'm now out of time and you are saved by the bell". That's a paraphrase, but very close.
So I get why the Democratic Leadership doesn't want to talk about this. It's not just the House that they'll probably take back next year and could do that with a pickup of at least 20 seats, but thanks to MAGA and President Trump, Chuck Schumer might be the Senate Majority Leader again in less than 2 years. But people who aren't in the Democratic Leadership, who are in the blogosphere, we can talk about this Joe Biden story all we want. Which is what I'm going to do today.
I partially agree with Chris Cilliza here. Joe Biden was the President and he should've been able to see the writing on the wall (so to speak( about his campaign and all the mental lapses and that his energy wasn't as good in 2023, even as it was in 2021 when he just became President. But isn't that the point: he wasn't able to see those things.
The whole point of The White House staff, is look out for the best interest of the President. And trying to protect the President from himself, is not looking out for his best interest. I hate to break it to anyone who is new to Washington, but not every thing here is political. There are actually times when the people around the boss, actually have to think about something other than their boss's political future and what his or her political goals are for the future. I made this point about President Biden last December:
"The reason why President Biden tried to run for reelection, is the same reason why any other President who ran for reelection did that, because he wanted to be a two-term President. It's almost embarrassing for President's to not get the 2nd term. And probably feels worst when you don't bother to run. Worst than that when you own damn party doesn't want you to run for reelection...
And the reason why politicians have staffs, is not to tell them how great they are and great they're doing. They should do that when things are going well for the boss. But to paraphrase author Chris Whipple: the staff is there to serve as the gatekeeper for their boss. That's why we have a White House Chief of Staff, that's why we have a Vice President, that's why the President has a team of political advisors. They're not just there to tell their boss how "awesome" they are, but to also break bad news for them and tell them not just when things aren't "awesome", but to tell them when they're reached the end of the road, politically, and when it's time to pass the torch. (To put a couple of cliches together)
And the President's Chief of Staff Ron Klain and his own Vice President Kamala Harris, even though they both saw and talked to President Biden everyday, as well as the rest of his political team, didn't do that. His family and political team didn't have that intervention (if I can use that word) with the President telling him to step down the from presidential race, until 2 weeks after the disastrous debate in June. Too late by then. You don't wait until you boss basically collapses on national TV, before you try to save him, especially after being so close to him and seeing what everyone else got to see, 6 months, maybe a year before the June, 24 debate.
