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)

Why so few spoke up. This tough yet fair account of an aging president's inauspicious reelection campaign makes a strong case that voters deserve to know more about their commander-in-chief's health. Joe Biden won in 2020 pledging to serve as "a bridge" to the next generation of Democrats, but his second-term bid, which promulgated "the lie" that he wasn't experiencing "cognitive diminishment," became "a charade that delivered the election" to Donald Trump. So say Tapper, a CNN anchor, and Thompson, an Axios political reporter. Their robust reporting--they interviewed about 200 people in and around the campaign--reveals that Biden showed worrying signs of age-related memory loss in 2019 and that, according to an unnamed insider, he was not always the sole boss during his presidency: "Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board." First Lady Jill Biden and a small group of Biden loyalists were among "the chief deniers of his deterioration." His staffers shut down intraparty discussions about his fitness for four more years; scheduled far fewer interviews and press conferences than his recent predecessors; questioned the professionalism of reporters working on news stories about Biden's memory struggles; and regularly withheld "bad news" from the president, even declining to show him polling that suggested he was losing to Trump. Why? Because "politics is addictive," according to one prominent Democrat. Meanwhile, "no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win," said a party donor. The authors suggest that Congress should consider legislation requiring a doctor for sitting presidents to swear to give detailed medical reports. As one physician tells the authors, "the yearly letter from the president's doctor is basically a tradition," not a legal requirement. An authoritative indictment of a denial-plagued presidential run. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.