It’s one of those moments that makes everyone who saw it live remember exactly where they were as it happened: June 27, 2024, the train wreck of a presidential debate that marked the beginning of the end of Joe Biden’s reelection efforts. And while that fateful night was the first time millions of Americans truly grasped the severity of their president’s declining health, the writing had been on the wall for some time among those in the know.
The truth about Biden’s condition — and the machinations of who knew about it and when — take center stage in the explosive new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. There’s so much to unpack within it that Katie invited the authors, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, for a revealing, in-depth interview about what they learned through their reporting. (And it’s worth noting that this conversation was conducted before news of Biden’s cancer diagnosis became public.)
Tapper and Thompson spoke to more than 200 sources for Original Sin — but in many cases, those people only agreed to speak after the 2024 election had concluded (and most of them would only do so anonymously). So why didn’t these people say something earlier, when Biden was still the Democratic candidate?
“In the case of most of them, I think some people were just looking out after their own self-interest and keeping their jobs,” Thompson said. “But I think for a decent number of people, it was a sincere fear of Donald Trump winning and a belief that going public with their concerns was only going to have the effect of helping Trump. And if you believe that he’s an essential threat to democracy, you can rationalize a lot.”
Through the accounts of these sources, the book contains multiple examples of what aides and colleagues described as Biden’s inability to handle the breadth of his job.
“Members of his cabinet told us anonymously that they were worried if there was a crisis at 2 a.m., how [Biden] would be able to respond,” Thompson said. “As we reported the book, a lot of people would concede [things like], Yes, he had to have meetings in the middle of the day, from 10 to 4. Could he speak? Not really. Yes, he was not as quick on the stump as he was. Yes, he had trouble moving and walking.”
And yet even staffers with this knowledge refused to admit at the time how the limitations were affecting Biden’s job performance. “At the end of the day, [our sources] said the hill they were dying on is that [Biden’s] decision-making was still the same as it was 20 years ago,” Thompson said. Tapper added, “That’s their argument today, their rebuttal to this.” (See a response to the book from a Biden spokesman here.)
Original Sin — and Katie’s chat with the authors — contains many examples of specific moments in which Biden’s behavior caused alarm among White House staff and fellow elected officials. As we know, Biden did eventually drop out of the presidential race in July 2024, opening the door for Vice President Kamala Harris to take over as the Democrats’ nominee. But in the run-up to Biden’s withdrawal from the race — and even after she’d become the candidate — Harris continued to defend the present’s mental acuity.
“We use the term in the book that she was loyal to a fault,” Tapper said. “She was so loyal to him that she was part of this problem.”
Harris’s ascendance to the top of the ticket after Biden dropped out is yet another reason the Democratic Party has developed such a serious trust problem with voters, the authors posit.
Tapper explained that Democrats “really haven’t had a competitive primary since Barack Obama ran in 2008.” That’s because, in 2016, “the party leaned on the scales for Hillary [Clinton] and was unfair to Bernie [Sanders],” he said. Then, in 2020, “the party came in and made Joe Biden the nominee because they were so scared of Bernie winning. And then in 2024, we had the fiasco that we write about.”
Tapper went on: “That’s one of the reasons why I think some of the arguments about Donald Trump being anti-democratic and January 6th and all that are perfectly legitimate arguments — I’m not disputing them — but I think it’s one of the reasons why a lot of voters don’t find them particularly compelling, because they’ve seen what Democrats did to Bernie in ’16 and ’20 and what they did with Biden in 2024. It’s not exactly, you know, small-D democracy.”
For much more on what was happening behind the scenes with President Biden and his staff, and what this all means for American politics (and Democrats specifically) moving forward, watch Katie’s full interview with Tapper and Thompson in the video above.
