Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
An explosive inside reckoning with one of the most fateful conspiracies inAmerican political history—the concerted effort by the President’s team to hidehis mental decline.

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. 2024 is theyear American politics became a Greek tragedy.

From the beginning of the Biden administration, some journalists, including Alex Thompsonand Jake Tapper, focused attention on signs of Joe Biden’s frailty. For their efforts they weresubject to extraordinary levels of personal vitriol from the White House, and even fromsome of their journalistic colleagues. Whatever the self-awareness of the perpetrators, itwas sheer gaslighting. In Original Sin, the check comes due.

Tapper and Thompson relate in vivid detail what Team Biden knew, when they knew it, andwhat they did or didn't do about it—including many news-making stories from some of themost powerful players in American politics. There is a general awareness of the effort toprotect his public image, but the details the authors have unearthed are genuinelyshocking. They raise fundamental issues of government accountability and responsibility,and of the role the news media plays. The irony is biting: in the name of defeating anexistential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle lost their way, and ensured thathis party’s nomination process was short-circuited, the public was given cause to doubt hisgood faith, and his Vice President was put in a situation that more than anything elsedoomed her to defeat. The deception, sometimes self-deception, surrounding Joe Biden'sdecline was the original sin of the administration and led directly to Donald Trump's returnto power and all that has happened as a consequence.

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is a reminder that the ends mustnever justify the means. The ends are ultimately unpredictable, and in reality, the meansare all we have.
1147044204
Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
An explosive inside reckoning with one of the most fateful conspiracies inAmerican political history—the concerted effort by the President’s team to hidehis mental decline.

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. 2024 is theyear American politics became a Greek tragedy.

From the beginning of the Biden administration, some journalists, including Alex Thompsonand Jake Tapper, focused attention on signs of Joe Biden’s frailty. For their efforts they weresubject to extraordinary levels of personal vitriol from the White House, and even fromsome of their journalistic colleagues. Whatever the self-awareness of the perpetrators, itwas sheer gaslighting. In Original Sin, the check comes due.

Tapper and Thompson relate in vivid detail what Team Biden knew, when they knew it, andwhat they did or didn't do about it—including many news-making stories from some of themost powerful players in American politics. There is a general awareness of the effort toprotect his public image, but the details the authors have unearthed are genuinelyshocking. They raise fundamental issues of government accountability and responsibility,and of the role the news media plays. The irony is biting: in the name of defeating anexistential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle lost their way, and ensured thathis party’s nomination process was short-circuited, the public was given cause to doubt hisgood faith, and his Vice President was put in a situation that more than anything elsedoomed her to defeat. The deception, sometimes self-deception, surrounding Joe Biden'sdecline was the original sin of the administration and led directly to Donald Trump's returnto power and all that has happened as a consequence.

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is a reminder that the ends mustnever justify the means. The ends are ultimately unpredictable, and in reality, the meansare all we have.
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Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

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Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Taking a nuanced look at how the 2024 election came to pass, this insightful lens into the monumental choice made by Biden and the aftermath that followed is exacting. No matter your political leanings, this is a fascinating assessment of the American sociopolitical landscape.

An explosive inside reckoning with one of the most fateful conspiracies inAmerican political history—the concerted effort by the President’s team to hidehis mental decline.

In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. 2024 is theyear American politics became a Greek tragedy.

From the beginning of the Biden administration, some journalists, including Alex Thompsonand Jake Tapper, focused attention on signs of Joe Biden’s frailty. For their efforts they weresubject to extraordinary levels of personal vitriol from the White House, and even fromsome of their journalistic colleagues. Whatever the self-awareness of the perpetrators, itwas sheer gaslighting. In Original Sin, the check comes due.

Tapper and Thompson relate in vivid detail what Team Biden knew, when they knew it, andwhat they did or didn't do about it—including many news-making stories from some of themost powerful players in American politics. There is a general awareness of the effort toprotect his public image, but the details the authors have unearthed are genuinelyshocking. They raise fundamental issues of government accountability and responsibility,and of the role the news media plays. The irony is biting: in the name of defeating anexistential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle lost their way, and ensured thathis party’s nomination process was short-circuited, the public was given cause to doubt hisgood faith, and his Vice President was put in a situation that more than anything elsedoomed her to defeat. The deception, sometimes self-deception, surrounding Joe Biden'sdecline was the original sin of the administration and led directly to Donald Trump's returnto power and all that has happened as a consequence.

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is a reminder that the ends mustnever justify the means. The ends are ultimately unpredictable, and in reality, the meansare all we have.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798217170210
Publisher: Diversified Publishing
Publication date: 06/10/2025
Edition description: Large Print
Pages: 464
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Jake Tapper wrote the bestselling nonfiction book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, which was turned into a critically acclaimed film in 2020, and two New York Times bestselling novels, The Hellfire Club and The Devil May Dance. He is an Emmy Award-winning TV journalist as lead DC anchor and chief Washington correspondent for CNN. A Dartmouth graduate and Philly native, he lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, daughter, son, three dogs, and cat.

Alex Thompson is a National Political Correspondent for Axios and a CNN contributor. He won the White House Correspondents' Association award for overall excellence in White House coverage for his reporting on Joe Biden in 2024. Before that, he created POLITICO’s “West Wing Playbook” newsletter and worked at The New York Times and Vice News. A Harvard graduate, he lives in Washington, DC. He has no pets, but is a proud uncle.

Read an Excerpt

Authors' Note

Our only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023– 2024, as told to us by approximately two hundred people, including lawmakers and White House and campaign insiders, some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages. Most of the information laid out in this book was shared with us after the election of 2024, when officials and aides felt considerably freer to talk. There are very few people named herein with whom we didn’t speak.

Our most important sources were Democrats inside and outside the White House who were grappling with how so many of them had been so focused on convincing voters that Donald Trump was a true existential threat to the nation that they put blinders on, participating in a charade that delivered the election directly into Trump’s hands.

Some spoke to us with regret that they hadn’t done more, or that they had waited so long to talk to the press about what was going on behind the scenes. Many were angry and felt deeply betrayed, not just by Biden but by his inner circle of advisers, his allies, and his family. They had seen bad moments behind the scenes but had been assured all was well. And then came the debate.

Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here. Nor will this book satisfy those seeking comfort that he was, through to the end, unaddled and perfectly capable of being president twenty‑four seven; that his rumored deterioration was all right‑wing propaganda. This is also false. As Biden’s presidency ended, it was difficult to find many top Democrats outside his immediate circle of family and closest aides who thought he could ably serve a second four‑year term.

This book is not an exoneration of the candidacy or presidencies of Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump. Journalism about Biden does not excuse or normalize any actions and statements by anyone else, in‑ cluding the forty‑fifth and now forty‑seventh president. Indeed, for those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.

The lessons from this book go beyond one man and one political party. They speak to more universal questions about cognitive disso‑ nance, groupthink, courage, cowardice, and patriotism.

George Orwell once wrote that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

He was writing about World War II, but he could have been writing about any time, any era. “The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye,” Orwell went on. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Here is what was in front of our noses.

—Jake and Alex

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