A review of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, 352 Pages, Penguin Random House (May 2025)

The befuddled old man who stumbled so pitifully through his 2024 debate with Donald Trump that he was forced to withdraw from the presidential race was not unfamiliar to those around him. As Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson demonstrate in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, those near President Joe Biden had been seeing and hearing this version of him for some time.

This raised two questions. First and most obviously, could this man be relied upon to serve as Americans’ commander in chief? A second and more subtle question woven into Tapper and Thompson’s account concerns the ideological direction in which Biden’s presidency moved—did his administration drift from his own lengthy political history and his stance as a presidential candidate because others were acting in his name or manipulating him?

Biden’s cognitive impairment was not only apparent to his staff during that disastrous live debate with Trump in June, it was also obvious in the privacy of the campaign’s own studios. Cutting footage for ads or other campaign use became a challenge, notwithstanding the tricks of video editing. “When they recorded videos,” Tapper and Thompson write, “much of the footage was unusable. ‘The man could not speak,’ said one person involved. It wasn’t his stutter; it was his inability to find words, to remember what he was saying, to stay on one train of thought.”

His camp decided that while this was an impediment to campaigning, it need not compromise his ability to govern. The ship of state could be steered by three aides who had “worked with Biden for many years, if not decades” whom Tapper and Thompson dub the “politburo”: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Bruce Reed. In addition, chief of staff Ron Klain, though newer to the team, may have been the most powerful of all. “‘Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,’ said one person familiar with the internal dynamic.” This arrangement, Tapper and Thompson report, was rationalised as follows:

“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,” said one longtime Biden aide. His aides could pick up the slack. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” the aide argued.

The justification for this Potemkin presidency was straightforward: the alternative—another term for Donald Trump—was unthinkable. Trump had attempted to steal the 2020 election and he was now openly promising a presidency of “retribution” were he to be re-elected. However, the strategy Biden’s team used to repulse this spectre amounted to a grand exercise in hubris, which led to the very outcome it was intended to prevent.

The hubris was, in the first instance, Biden’s own. He may not have understood the dimensions of his own frailty, but he knew he was not the man he once was, and there was no reason for his belief that only he could defeat Trump. Then Biden’s hubris was compounded by that of his aides. Not one American in a hundred knew the names Donilon, Ricchetti, Reed, and Klain. Despite what an unnamed aide told Tapper and Thompson, Americans had not in fact voted for them. Of course, voters know that every high official has aides, but the issue in this case was the degree to which these aides were fulfilling the duties of a president who was no longer able to do so himself.