“The original sin of Election 2024 was [President Joe] Biden’s decision to run for reelection—followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.”

That is the thesis of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin, which offers readers a timeline of events, especially in 2023–24, to substantiate the thesis. The authors interviewed dozens of Democratic politicians, apparatchiks, consultants, and donors, both named and anonymous, in addition to relying on reportage from nearly 36 printed sources. Even though the narrative is 314 pages long, it is compulsively readable and well worth reading.

I am a Republican voter who did not vote for Biden in either 2020 or 2024. For what it’s worth, I didn’t vote for Trump either. Since 2016, I have not checked the box for either  major-party candidate. In a nation of nearly 350 million people, I am constantly amazed that we cannot find better candidates than the ones Democrats and Republicans offer.

But that is a rant for a different review. Here, I’d simply like to note a few things about Original Sin.

First, I believe it demonstrates Biden experienced cognitive decline during his presidency. Indeed, some of the authors’ sources indicate they observed the decline beginning prior to 2020. Unfortunately, there are no before-and-after cognitive tests to substantiate this decline at the level of medical diagnosis, but up-close observations by long-term allies substantiate it, nonetheless.

Second, Original Sin demonstrates that Biden aides — and to a lesser extent, allies — covered up his cognitive decline for partisan reasons. They did this by restricting access to the president, even by senior administration leaders; limiting public appearances; scripting his interactions with both members of the press and of the public; editing videos to hide his inability to communicate clearly; and pointing to the partisan motives of his critics.

Even though these aides and allies witnessed the decline firsthand, many believed Biden was still capable of making presidential decisions and stated so in their interviews with the authors.

Third, the partisan framing of the book makes it difficult for the authors to ask deeper, more critical questions about Biden. Why was Biden’s “original sin” choosing to run for reelection rather than remaining in office in the first place? If Biden didn’t have the wherewithal to campaign for the presidency, how did he nonetheless have the wherewithal to continue making presidential decisions? And if Biden had experienced significant cognitive decline, who in fact was making decisions?

Just to ask these questions makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. Fine. But Tapper and Thompson demonstrate that there was in fact a conspiracy to hide the president’s condition not only from the general public, but even from many of his closest supporters. So I feel the deeper, more critical questions are warranted.

Surveys have found that Americans increasingly do not trust the institutions that shape their lives, including the federal government and mass media. Sadly, Original Sin gives readers even more reason to distrust those institutions. The president of the United States was too diminished to campaign (and to govern?). His closest aides and allies tried to hide the decline. And many journalists — such as Jake Tapper himself — denied what ordinary Americans were seeing with their own eyes.

Book Reviewed
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (New York: Penguin Press, 2025).

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