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

In this merciless exposé, CNN anchorman Tapper (All the Demons Are Here) and Axios correspondent Thompson recap Joe Biden’s mounting cognitive issues from his 2020 campaign to his catastrophic, campaign-ending 2024 debate with Donald Trump. They catalog his symptoms in unsparing detail, noting his whispery mumble, empty-eyed gape, halting gait, memory lapses, 4 p.m. sundowning, and incoherent speech. There were serious policy repercussions to Biden’s frailty, the authors argue, chalking his chaotic immigration policies up to his inability to resolve clashes between different administration factions. The authors also describe an extensive cover-up of these deficits by Biden’s aides, who scripted and teleprompted every utterance while smearing anyone who questioned his mental fitness. (White House lawyers even pressured the Justice Department to remove comments on Biden’s poor memory from a report on his mishandling of classified documents.) Drawing on extensive interviews with Biden administration insiders, Tapper and Thompson paint an intricate, appalling panorama of hubris and delusion on the part of Biden, who imagined himself a man of destiny, and his tunnel-visioned handlers, who ignored critics and polls. They convey it all in pungent scenes of Democratic dismay over the president’s disintegration (“Hooooooooooly shit,” gasped George Clooney, when a zombie-like Biden couldn’t recognize him at a fundraiser). The result is a colorful and telling indictment of the blinkered self-interest that rules American politics. (May)