Three curtains of lies surrounded former President Joe Biden for his entire term and kept the country in the dark about the important matter of whether the president’s health left him cognitively fit to discharge the duties of his office. Original Sin, the new, much-discussed book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, draws back the curtains, but a good deal of shadow remains.

The first curtain was hung by the president’s family and close advisers. As the authors inform us, many around Biden began to see the signs of mental decline in 2019 as the former vice president struggled with memory and stamina as he began a grueling race for the presidency. It was Biden’s fourth shot at the White House and, at the age of 77, most observers thought it would be the old warhorse’s last race.

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Some around Biden say the decline dates back even further, the authors write, to 2015, when his son Beau died of brain cancer. Burying a child is emotionally crushing for any parent, and this was the second time Biden had done it. “His grief seemed to break something inside him.” Add to this the addiction problems that landed both his surviving children in rehab in 2019, and it is surprising that Biden ran at all. But Biden had had his eye on the White House for his whole adult life and, as Abraham Lincoln said, “No man knows, when that presidential grub gets to gnawing at him, just how deep it will get until he has tried it.” Biden and his family, as Tapper and Thompson note, also have a massive capacity for self-delusion. Just as Biden refused to accept that Beau’s condition was fatal, he refused to accept that his own career was dead or that time had slowed him in any meaningful way.

He was, against all odds, correct about the first half of that delusion about his career. Perhaps more than anyone in the world, Biden benefited from the outbreak of COVID-19; first in that it weakened the incumbent President Donald Trump, who had to that point been overseeing a nation that was prosperous and (mostly) at peace, and second, because it let his family and advisers hide the candidate from the crowds, town halls, and tough interviews he could no longer handle.

They closed the curtain around Biden in 2020 and never lifted it. As the authors make clear, this was a conscious decision by a cadre of long-standing advisers informally known as “the Politburo” — Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Bruce Reed. From the campaign to the White House, this troika, along with chief of staff Ron Klain and first lady Jill Biden, tightly controlled access to their principal to a degree never seen before in American politics.

By 2021, one congressman called Biden’s remarks to House Democrats “incomprehensible.” In 2022, Bill Daley, who had known Biden for years but was now shut out from access to him, could tell from what he saw on TV that the president was not all there. So could many other Democratic politicians. But none had the courage to say it out loud and on the record.

The Politburo’s deceit was masterly, and the White House was largely leak-proof. Even so, a large segment of the population saw through this deception almost immediately and said so. But they weren’t Democrats, so it didn’t count. 

Trump called his 2020 opponent “Hidin’ Biden,” and other Republicans quickly picked up on the fact that the Democratic nominee kept a light schedule, rarely took questions from the press, and interacted with the public less than any candidate they had ever seen. But once Team Biden won the presidency with this strategy, it was never going to change. An isolated, diminishing president did not mean that the White House had any less power or prestige. It just meant that the man elected to wield power wasn’t the one doing it. 

Instead, power trickled down to a host of unelected and unknown (outside of Washington) politicos who were determined never to give it up. If the “country before party” banner that anti-Trump partisans had waved since 2016 meant anything more than empty words, these people would have told the world of the fraud at the heart of our government. Instead, they kept mum and governed the country themselves while the president drifted into senility. 

This deception was possible only because the second curtain around the president was placed there by his friends in the mainstream press. “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the Washington Post piously intoned while simultaneously determining never to shine a single photon of light on the shadow government in the White House.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd recently called the four-year scandal “the anti-Watergate.” The phrase sums up the actions of the legacy press completely. Modern journalism’s foundational myth is the Watergate scandal, in which two intrepid young journalists dug deeply into an administration’s lies and skullduggery and, in doing so, exposed the truth and brought down a president. Fifty years on, the ideological descendants of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein spent every bit as much time and energy doing the opposite: taking the administration’s pronouncements at face value and loudly criticizing anyone who had the audacity to disagree. 

It is fitting that Alex Thompson is the co-author of this book. While the right-wing press had been pointing out Biden’s stumbles and insularity, the legacy media joined the administration in calling videos of the president “cheap fakes” that were made only for political gain. In Thompson, though, the left-wing media found their first prominent dissenter. “The White House is basically hiding Biden as he auditions for another term,” he wrote for Axios in April 2023, years after you could have read similar sentiments in this magazine’s pages, among others, but still years ahead of his legacy media cohort. The reaction from Bidenworld was swift and furious. Campaign chairwoman Jen O’Malley Dillon replied with one word, “False,” a statement that was both economical and entirely untrue. 

“Many reporters took the White House denials at face value,” the authors write. “Few other outlets outside conservative media followed the story.” It was a truly astonishing state of affairs for the fourth estate. “Like firefighters who run into a fire, journalists run toward a story,” MSNBC’s Katy Tur said in 2017. By 2021, they more closely resembled the firemen of Fahrenheit 451.

One of those reporters who took the White House denials at face value was CNN’s Jake Tapper, which makes his presence as Thompson’s co-author quite curious. Unlike Thompson, Tapper publicly bought into the White House’s lies right up until the moment when the farce was unsustainable. In September 2023, Tapper was still calling Biden “sharp mentally,” while admitting that the president had slowed physically — the White House talking points. In March 2024, after former special counsel Robert Hur’s report characterized Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” Tapper noted that Biden had “some memory issues” but insisted “it’s not disqualifying.” It was only in June, while moderating the debate in which Biden revealed to the world what he and everyone in Bidenworld had tried their best to conceal, that the scales fell from Tapper’s eyes. “Holy smokes,” he typed on his iPad as, mere feet away, Biden’s campaign imploded. 

Did Tapper really believe that Biden was mentally sound? Was he playing along with the lie out of a desire to beat Trump at all costs? Either answer is a failure of the highest order for a journalist. So, what does Tapper add to a book that Thompson would have been justified in writing alone? As a more senior and more prominent journalist, he likely had better access to the sources who, after the fact, were happy to go on the record with their concerns about Biden’s mental acuity. With the platform of a CNN show and nearly 3 million X followers, Tapper also had the audience that Thompson didn’t. In return, Tapper gets the chance to whitewash his own reputation. 

But as much as we blame the mainstream press, and they deserve all of it and more, the third veil thrown over the Biden administration was put there by all of his ordinary supporters who bought the story unflinchingly, rather than believing their own eyes and ears. That is only possible through the deep polarization and tribalism of America in the 2020s. Original Sin is a story of the failure of two institutions, the government and the news media, that used to command the respect of a wide swath of the public. But each time they fail, each time they are caught in a lie, some of those who trusted them will cease to do so. Destroying trust is easy. Building it up again is hard.

It is good, in some ways, that the news business is more multifarious than it used to be, but it also means average citizens have a much easier time finding news sources that tell them exactly what they want to hear. Not every reader can look into the sources of every news story. Who has the time? But we owe it to ourselves to look beyond the outlets on “our side” once in a while and to consider a position advanced by the “other side.” Conservatives can pat ourselves on the back for calling out Bidenworld’s lies before anyone else did, but we should also be humble enough to realize that we, too, could be tricked by motivated reasoning.

The same week this book hit the shelves, Biden announced that he was suffering from prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. Amid the universal expressions of condolence and prayer, some were bold enough to ask: “Did he go from healthy to Stage 4 cancer in 100 days? How long have they known about this diagnosis?”

BIDEN’S PARTING ACT SHOWS PRESIDENTIAL CLEMENCY POWERS NEED REFORM

Given the way Biden’s people governed for four years, and campaigned for two years before that, it is not unreasonable to wonder whether they’re being honest about the ex-president’s health, is it?

“Biden diagnosis draws well-wishes, questions and conspiracy theories,” read the headline in the Washington Post. Conspiracy theories! This is a term close readers of the media will remember seeing used to minimize perspectives on the Russiagate scandal, the origins of COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab rather than a pangolin or a bat in a wet market, and much else that eventually became mainstream opinion. Another curtain of lies may already be descending.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.