“He totally fucked us,” says Kamala Harris’s former top campaign aide David Plouffe. He’s quoted in Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the much-hyped new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson. Plouffe appears to think that it was entirely Joe Biden’s fault that Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election. “It’s all Biden,” he says. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party.” Plenty of top Democrats in the book think similarly. The “original sin” of the title is Biden’s decision to run for reelection, which many leading figures in the party are now willing to admit was a terrible decision. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people,” says one senior Democrat, calling the decision an “abomination.”

Biden was clearly in no shape to serve a second term, at the end of which he would have been 86 years old. The public understood this. In 2022, a majority of Americans said that Biden lacked the mental sharpness to be president, and by 2023, three quarters of Americans thought Biden was too old to run for reelection. As this magazine noted early that year, only seven percent of voters were enthusiastic about Biden running again. It was obvious that Biden was suffering at least some level of age-related cognitive decline. He had always been rambly and often incoherent, but there were more and more concerning lapses, like forgetting the number of grandchildren he had (in fairness, this was confusing, since at the time the official Biden family number was lower than the actual number) or getting completely lost in the middle of his sentences. The president became a national punchline—“Biden Forgets Nation’s Name,” ran a 2023 Onion headline. 

It was so obvious that Biden should not have been running for reelection that Original Sin is almost superfluous. Yes, we all knew that, we all saw it, and some of us were saying at the time that Biden had no business running for a second term. The only real mystery left is why there were so many Democrats determined to, in Tapper and Thompson’s words, “pretend [Biden] wasn’t mentally melting before our eyes,” even though their denial ultimately had catastrophic consequences. 

In fact, plenty of senior Democrats knew that the situation was far more concerning than the public even understood, and “what was going on in private was worse.” The party line during Biden’s presidency was that while he could be halting and incoherent in public, in private he was sharp as a tack. (And I do mean the party line. As the New York Times reported in 2023, “so many [Biden advisers] use the phrase ‘sharp as a tack’ to describe him that it has become something of a mantra.”) This didn’t make too much sense (why would he suddenly spring to life when the cameras were off?), nor did the explanation that his fumbling was due to a childhood stutter that had not been noticeable for the first four decades of his political career. But Tapper and Thompson take us behind the scenes, showing that the public often saw a deceptively coherent Biden, thanks to the careful curation of his appearances (only during certain hours of the day), avoiding unscripted moments, shortening speeches, editing videos, etc. An attempt at a 5 minute video had to be reduced to 2 minutes because “much of the footage was unusable” since “the man could not speak.” 

Biden had to script his own Cabinet meetings, with staff asking Cabinet secretaries to prepare questions beforehand so that he could read the answers off notes during the meetings. Things were bad “from the beginning,” according to one cabinet secretary. Since “at least 2022” Biden “had moments where he cannot recall the names of top aides whom he sees every day.” (He called National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan “Steve,” though as Jon Stewart pointed out, Sullivan looks like he could easily be a Steve.) There was a “limit to the hours in which [Biden] could reliably function and an increasing number of moments where he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades.” 

He was “meandering and incoherent,” he would tell the same story multiple times, and even if you had known him for years he “would look at you like he’d never seen you before.” He would tell stories that supposedly took place in years where the people he mentioned (like former German chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President Francois Mitterand) would have been long dead. In 2021, Biden went to Capitol Hill, apparently to rally congressional support for passing his infrastructure bill, but instead gave an “incomprehensible” speech and then left without actually asking them to pass the bill, alarming Democratic members of Congress. Sometimes Biden’s unpredictable remarks had major foreign policy consequences, as when he, seemingly off the cuff and to the alarm of advisers, upturned decades of “strategic ambiguity” policy toward China by promising to defend Taiwan militarily. (The White House then had to scramble to insist the policy hadn’t actually changed and the president didn’t mean what he said.) 

Accommodations were made. Biden wore “maximum stability” sneakers with an extra-wide sole so he wouldn’t fall over, he started using the short stairs on Air Force One, events were scheduled during the hours he could be relied on to function, “the vocabulary shrank” for speeches, and interviews with the press were limited (he gave 38 interviews over a time period in which Trump had given 116). He couldn't give a ten-minute speech at a fundraiser without a teleprompter. Biden’s team even brought in Steven Spielberg to try to improve the lighting and microphones for his videos, but he “had trouble taping even mundane video remarks without flubbing lines.” Videos were put in cinematic slow-motion so that it wasn’t as obvious how slowly Biden actually walked. Nevertheless, his decline was “evident to most people that watched him,” in the words of Democratic Congressman Brian Higgins. By December 2023, Biden couldn’t even greet people at the White House Christmas Party, where he seemed “completely out of it.” 

The decline was not absolute. Like many older people, Biden had good days and bad days, good hours and bad hours. He could rally and surprise people, as he did with his “feisty” 2024 State of the Union address. Tapper and Thompson say they reject the view that he was “little more than a husk from the beginning of his presidency.” But he was the president of the United States, where the expected standard of fitness is not just better than a husk, and “cabinet secretaries in his own administration” said he could not be relied on to “perform at 2:00 a.m. during an emergency.” In 2023-2024, the Cabinet didn’t even have access to Biden for “months,” as there was a “deliberate strategy by the White House to have him meet with as few people as necessary.” 

One important takeaway of the book is that Biden’s decline did not begin in 2023 or even 2024. In fact, Original Sin provides convincing evidence that Biden had no business being president in the first place. This itself is not exactly a revelation; observers like Glenn Greenwald were saying in 2020 that Biden’s deterioration was “visible to the naked eye,” and even Cory Booker said that “there are definitely moments where you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.” 

But according to Tapper and Thompson, the “first signs he was deteriorating” came in 2015. After his son Beau’s death,“parts of Biden’s brain and mental capacity seemed to dissolve like someone poured hot water on [them],” according to a “senior White House official at the time.” In 2019, Biden forgot the name of Mike Donilon, perhaps his closest confidante other than his wife, who had worked with Biden since 1981. During the 2020 campaign, Biden’s behavior was oftenbizarre. That was the year that Biden infamously forgot the words to the Declaration of Independence, issuing his stirring alternative: “[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women are created by the, you know, you know the thing.” Tapper and Thompson write that “voters were coming out of Biden’s events less likely to support him” and “precinct captains disappeared or said no thanks after attending a Biden rally.” When the campaign tried to produce some videos of Biden for the 2020 Democratic National Convention, those who saw the results said they were “horrible,” that Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all,” and it was “like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.” One of the Democrats involved in the films’ production said “I didn’t think he could be president,” and felt angry upon realizing that “they’ve been gaslighting us.” The videos were edited down to a few minutes of footage in order to deceive the public. 

The COVID-19 pandemic killed millions worldwide, but Tapper and Thompson conclude that it was “one of the best things to happen to Biden’s presidential hopes” in 2020, because it allowed him to avoid the kinds of public appearances that would have revealed his weaknesses. He could “avoid[...] grueling travel and campaign remotely” and use a teleprompter during interviews. Biden still only just squeaked into office against a historically unpopular incumbent. 

In fact, as Tapper and Thompson note, the only reason Biden became the candidate at all in 2020 was that “the Democratic establishment successfully rallied to stop” Bernie Sanders. Biden was “the candidate of last resort for the establishment,” who were determined to avoid a Sanders nomination at all costs. If we want to identify a true “original sin,” then—to find the starting point for the unfolding nightmare that has brought us to a second Trump term—it is not Biden’s delusional belief that he could serve a second term. Rather, it was the party elite’s conclusion in 2020 that they would rather prop up an incompetent, deteriorating Joe Biden than support the most popular politician in America, because Bernie’s social democratic agenda posed an economic threat to the donor class. The late senator Mike Gravel (or, more precisely, the teenagers he entrusted to be his voice on Twitter) presciently warned in 2019 that:

“If Democrats nominate Joe Biden, he may win, and we'll have four years of weak, feckless Democratic leadership. And then, in four years, he'll be defeated by a Republican Party even more openly white nationalist. If you nominate an Obama redux, you'll just get a worse Trump redux.”

And so, here we are with our “worse Trump redux.”

But is it “all Biden,” as Plouffe alleges? As critical as I’ve been of the man, I just don’t think that’s fair to him. Biden was vain, selfish, and delusional. He was also morally heinous, supporting Israel in its campaign of destruction against Gaza and pretending to be trying to end the violence. But plenty of others bear substantial responsibility for getting us to the awful position we are currently in.

In fact, Original Sin seems to be partly an opportunity for high-ranking Democrats to absolve themselves of any blame by shifting it onto Biden, now that he is weak and powerless (and, though they couldn’t have known this when they gave their quotes, stricken with advanced prostate cancer). The Harris campaign itself has plenty to answer for. It squandered a ton of money, and Harris made disastrous blunders, including refusing to break with Biden on Gaza. But if the story of the election is that Biden simply “fucked” the Democrats, so that it was impossible for them to win, nobody needs to be on the hook for these mistakes. Tapper and Thompson recite the old saying that “victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” which seems appropriate. There is little evidence in the book that top Democrats are introspecting or taking any responsibility for their own role in taking us toward 2024’s horrific outcome. 

Some of the Democratic insiders that Tapper and Thompson quote were actively lying about Biden during the period where speaking out about his condition might actually have made a difference. The strategist who lambasts Biden for “stealing an election” turns out to have been someone who “publicly defended Biden” during the campaign. Of course, we don’t actually know who these people are, because Tapper and Thompson quote many of their sources anonymously. They report speaking to four different Biden cabinet secretaries, but apparently none of them were willing to go on the record under their real names, perhaps because it would reveal just how much they’d covered for Biden during his presidency. 

In the story of the “emperor’s new clothes,” it is not the emperor, but the crowd, that ensures the survival of the lie. Much of the blame here clearly belongs to the coterie of sycophants who insisted Biden was fine when “he was clearly not fucking fine,” in the words of a top Democrat who nevertheless publicly defended the president every day. Insiders “saw things that shocked them” but “said nothing.” One donor explained that “no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win.” They didn’t speak publicly because “doing so would make them pariahs,” as happened to Dean Phillips, who was warned by House Democrats that his choice to challenge Biden had “killed a once-promising political career.” 

The rationalizations people made were laughable. One Biden aide reasoned that “he just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.” I mean, yes, that might work to win reelection, but the point of politics is surely not to keep Joe Biden in office for as long as possible, but to govern, which requires more than “showing proof of life every once in a while.” (Sometimes it was hard for Biden to even do that, with those who saw him saying it could be “like watching someone who was not alive” and that he was so withered that touching him was “like touching Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.”) Internally, people were thinking things like “This is crazy. Crazy.” At one point, donor Ari Emanuel screamed “What the fuck are we doing?” at a Biden deputy. But no organized effort to oust Biden was made until after his infamous June 2024 debate meltdown. 

For some, of course, keeping Joe Biden in office was the point of politics. When I spoke to Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks in July 2024 (who, like Phillips, ran a long-shot presidential campaign to try to draw attention to Biden’s weakness, and desperately pleaded with Democrats to stop him), he explained that for some in politics, Joe Biden was a meal ticket:

“For them, winning is keeping their job, and as long as Joe Biden's the candidate, they keep their job, their power, their status, etc., which is super important to them in Washington.”

Mike Donilon, the adviser whose name Biden forgot in 2019, was to be paid an astonishing $4 million for his role in the months-long campaign, “orders of magnitude” greater than what all other staff were receiving. (Donilon appears to have been fully paid even though the campaign was aborted.) To have pushed Biden out of the race would have killed the goose that was about to lay a $4 million golden egg. 

Biden had an unhealthy “uniquely small and loyal inner circle” who were prone to groupthink. “None of them would permit the others to demonstrate any doubt,” write Tapper and Thompson. The delusion was not just about Joe’s condition, but about the fact that he “was having a very successful presidency.” He clearly wasn’t. Biden was massively unpopular, with “atrocious polling numbers,” but his staff concluded that “we don’t need polling.” Biden operatives constantly insisted that “Bidenomics” was delivering wondrous results for the American peopleeven as the American people themselves loudly disagreed. As one senior Democrat later put it: “You’re in Fantasyland. You’re saying the economy’s great, and voters are like ‘on what planet’?” 

The Biden family also seems to have been especially prone to delusions. Jill Biden, of course, infamously reassured Joe that he “did such a great job” after he delivered the worst performance of any president in any debate in U.S. history. Tapper and Thompson conclude that there was a “family dynamic built around rejection of reality,” which included a denial of the extent of Hunter Biden’s misdeeds. Tapper and Thompson even report that when Biden’s son Beau was diagnosed with cancer in 2013, Beau lied about the diagnosis, telling journalists that his doctor had given him a “clean bill of health.” That deception came partially at the encouragement of his father Joe, who “instructed his team to mislead the media about his whereabouts” when he visited his son in the hospital. Tapper and Thompson report that Beau’s wife “didn’t understand why they had to keep his illness a secret.” (The fact that the Bidens have previously covered up a cancer diagnosis will only add fuel to suspicions that Joe Biden’s stage 4 prostate cancer was known about earlier than this week, although medical professionals have said discovering the cancer this late is not actually implausible.) 

If someone tried to question Biden’s fitness for office, Biden and his operatives would aggressively turn on them and “shame them on social media.” When David Axelrod raised perfectly reasonable concerns, Biden reportedly called him a “prick.” (His granddaughter opted for “jerk.”) Early in 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur reported, after interviewing Biden, that he wouldn’t be prosecuting him for mishandling classified documents in part because Biden’s memory was so bad that a jury would be sympathetic to him. Bidenworld instantly turned on Hur, calling him a liar and a partisan. 

The media was discouraged from pursuing the story. When a reporter from a national news outlet planned to report on internal concerns about Biden’s fitness, she received a call from the White House, who sent her the clear message that they would “aggressively dispute it, on the record, and portray her as a liar.” The reporter stopped the investigation. That journalist was not alone in taking a cowardly, tentative approach. One of the unspoken undercurrents of Original Sin is that the media dropped the ball on a major scandal. Why, after all, are Tapper and Thompson telling us all of this only now, long after Biden has left office? It’s because they failed in their duty as reporters during Biden’s presidency. Tapper himself had aggressively questioned those who raised the issue of Biden’s mental fitness, warning against “diagnosing politicians from afar.” 

Plenty of others who were not formally part of the administration helped shut down criticism and preserve the myth of Biden’s acuity by portraying discussion of Biden’s mental and physical condition as offensive. Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor said Robert Hur’s remarks were an “outrageous lie.” (Vietor has now admitted, too late, that this was unfair.) The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner said Hur was carrying out a “hit job” and seemed like a “Republican operative.” “Any news org that puts Biden’s memory in the headline is actively rewarding Hur’s bad faith and giving the Trump campaign what they want,”said Greg Sargent of the New Republic. The Congressional Integrity Project put out a brief on the “lies and false claims of Robert Hur,” which it appears to have since deleted. Even back in 2020, Democratic-supporting pundits were running columns saying that criticizing Biden’s fitness for office was “ableism born out of laziness.” He was just the same old “loveable gaffe machine” he had always been. 

But the story of the Democratic Party’s rot goes far deeper than the disastrous 2024 presidential campaign. For one thing, Biden is not the only instance of Democrats trying to keep an aging politician in office even at the expense of the party’s own political success. Last year, party elites, including Nancy Pelosi, worked to hand the chairmanship of the House Oversight Committee to Gerry Connolly, a septuagenarian congressman dying of cancer, in order to prevent the dynamic young upstart Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from becoming too powerful. (“I’ve never had my chance to be a ranking member or a chairman of a full committee. This is it,” said Connolly, as if the party should be dedicated to letting Connolly personally achieve his dreams rather than achieving any political objectives.) This week, Connolly died, proving yet again that many Democrats preferred incapacity to social democracy. Astonishingly, as Branko Marcetic points out, this preference for keeping the aging in power over achieving political objectives has ensured the passage of the Republican federal budget in the House: 

Three Democrats who would've made the losing vote 214-217 died in office this year. So basically, the budget Democrats have warned non-stop is a disaster will pass directly because of their insistence they stay in Congress until death.

The Democratic Party, even post-Biden, is hugely unpopular despite voters’ dissatisfaction with Trump. The problem here predates Biden. It is the same problem that we were writing about in 2016, when the widely-disliked Hillary Clinton was favored by party elites over Bernie Sanders. In that race, Democrats chose to run an uninspiring establishment candidate rather than embrace a populist alternative. They lost to Donald Trump. The story of Democratic politics since Obama is the story of a party that has totally failed to connect with ordinary people, opening the door for a radical right-wing movement that could never succeed if Democrats would simply revive FDR-style social democratic politics, grow a backbone, get some charisma, and learn how to inspire and govern. Instead, all we hear are excuses and delusion. The Biden presidency was a low point, with an obviously unpopular and inept president being hailed by party elites as transformative and successful. But there are plenty of other case studies, including establishment figures and organizations liningupbehind corrupt sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo against his dynamic Democratic opponent Zohran Mamdani in the current New York City mayoral race. Party elites have even tried to thwart David Hogg’s effort to produce a younger cohort of Democratic politicians, despite the fact that Hogg isn’t attempting an ideological transformation of the party, merely an effort to ensure that those under 40 feel they have representation. 

Even if we think that Biden is the reason Trump won in 2024, we still face the question of why Trump won in 2016, or why Biden barely squeaked into office in 2020, or why Republicans now control both houses of Congress. The broader tendency of the Democrats losing touch with working people cannot be pinned on Joe Biden alone, and fixing the problem will require overthrowing an entire leadership apparatus that has shown time and time again that it has no interest in fighting the right effectively.