I shotgunned Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson when it came out yesterday. I’m not sure why. I wanted some closure maybe. I wanted someone to blame. I wasn’t exactly shocked by what I read, but it did confirm the suspicions most of us have had for a while.
They knew. All of them. Biden was not physically or intellectually capable of running for a second term. They let it happen anyway.
The book recounts moment after moment both in the public eye and in private where people encountered Biden as diminished physically and mentally. Donors, diplomats, longtime friends, senators, aides, Democratic leadership, Republican opposition, cabinet members, special councils, each of them, to a person, would come away from these meetings shocked by Biden’s mumbling incoherence and saying to themselves, “I hope I just caught him on a bad day. I hope he’s not like this all the time.”
To be fair, it wasn’t all the time. There were also moments of clarity when he needed to make a decision, or make a daring run into the warzone in Kyiv, or scrap with his detractors from the podium during his fire-y State of the Union speech when he seemed to be what his supporters hoped he always was. But even then people who desperately wanted to support him came away shaking their heads. In large and small ways what Biden said and did reminded them of aged loved ones who were in their final moments of battling Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or dementia. After the 2024 State of the Union Biden met with a group of high school students, and none of them could hear him or understand what he said due to the president’s incoherent rambling and whispering.
I suppose this was hard for me to accept at the time because his opponent lied so incessantly. The entire Republican political apparatus, particularly its conservative media wing, did nothing but talk about Biden’s cognitive decline for years on end. They also said COVID was a hoax, the former president was 6′ 220lbs, that January sixth both never happened and was a day of peace and love, and have recently announced that we should tariff an island of penguins. Because they are so often flagrantly and laughably wrong, it was easy to dismiss their claims as partisan chicanery or outright disinformation. Turns out this time the Democrats were the ones hacking down the cherry tree of public trust.
Politicians lash out when threatened. It is unfortunate. I’ve never held much esteem for any of them. I had just hoped that when faced with the monstrous evil and stupidity on the other side of the aisle– a genuine threat to the American way of life, the American political machine could produce someone to at least fight to support the system that funnels them power. The problem is that this requires selflessness. Stepping back from power. Honesty. Traits which are anathema to surviving as a political animal.
Then came the debate when all was laid bare and the truth was undeniable. According to the book, Jake Tapper, who was moderating the debate, messaged the CNN control room during Biden’s first rambling answer, “Holy shit.” Which pretty accurately summarized how I felt too.
The book spent some time with the tawdry tabloid details of the larger Biden family, culminating with Biden choosing to pre-pardon his family members and thus removing any moral or ethical distinction between himself and the self-serving machinations of his prede/successor. Biden acted selfishly to cling to power. Biden wielded his office to protect himself and his family. All of the high-minded sanctimony and “preservation of the soul of America” talk was just bluster. He failed the moment morally, and more importantly, he never attempted to save anything but himself.
They knew. But I think we all did. I, for one, was willing to swallow any cognitive dissonance to keep the current administration out of power again. I would have then and would still now have preferred a protective polit bureau chaired by an addled figurehead running the country than the current ill-informed vindictive Machiavelli whose grasp of complex issues is paper-thin at best. It turned out not to have mattered in the end. The original sin which the book’s title points toward was not the cover ups and doublespeak that tried to convince us that Biden actually was okay, it was the choice made by Biden and those around him to allow the president to try to seek a second term at all.
Now this sin has distanced us from goodness and grace. Its curse will be visited upon us for generations to come.
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About Joshua Rigsby
Joshua Rigsby runs an independent bookstore in a small southern town. His writing has been featured on Thrillist, Atlas Obscura, Southern California Public Radio, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Atlantic.
