We’re finally allowed to say Biden was senile!

So, Joe Biden spent a great deal of his term in office suffering from what might politely be called senile dementia, and those who enabled him led the Democrats to one of their most humiliating electoral defeats off the back of this subterfuge.

This cannot in all honesty be called a revelation.When I first read the breathless headlines that came about from the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s exposé of the Biden regime, Original Sin, I was reminded of Horatio’s words in Hamlet: “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave, to tell us this.” And although Biden himself may not be in the grave, the (suspiciously timed) announcement of his late-stage prostate cancer may mean that this book functions as an epitaph of sorts for him. But does it work? 

Tapper and Thompson are both journalists, rather than political insiders, but they have spoken to hundreds of Biden-era staffers and hangers-on, all of whom have an axe to grind, mainly because they are now unemployed. (That many would have been similarly out of work in a Kamala Harris regime is ignored.) The tenor of Original Sin can be judged by the title of the first chapter – “He totally fucked us” – and it goes on from there. Biden is presented not merely as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” in the damning words of special counsel Robert Hur, but as an arrogant, Lear-like figure who may have been relatively compos mentis when he won office in 2020, but swiftly unraveled under the pressures of the job. 

The authors write in the introduction that “this book is not an exoneration of the candidacy or presidencies of Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump.” It is unclear as to whether the book was intended as a sop to Democrats – who can now distance themselves from the Biden administration as being bound up with the machinations of those around an elderly and increasingly incapable man – or Republicans, who will be able to dine out on the revelations herein for years, possibly decades, to come. It is often easy to forget that Trump’s victory did not come against Biden, so ephemeral and ill-prepared a candidate was Kamala Harris, and the president’s continued jibes at “Sleepy Joe” are made in the knowledge that whoever assumes the party’s mantle for the 2028 contest will be repudiating every aspect of his presidency, so tainted has it been by the manner of his leaving it. 

Original Sin may be great gossip, but it is not a great book. It isn’t especially well written, taking on the breathless tabloid prose that so many of these swiftly packaged political volumes assume. Tapper and Thompson also have little to say about the wider context of Democratic politics that led to the disastrous decision not to remove Biden. Was it loyalty to a man – perhaps the only man – who could have beaten Trump, or was it cowardice? There is no clear answer here – both are, at points, suggested – but in truth, nobody is going to read this book for genuine analysis. Readers are going to want prurient speculation about Biden’s declining mental health, and they will find that in spades. 

In the conclusion, the authors try and draw a parallel with the other great political cover-up of modern times. They write that “Joe Biden is not Richard Nixon, and the hiding and cover-up of his deterioration is not Watergate. It is an entirely separate scandal.” The choice of the word “scandal” rather than “tragedy” – as a more sympathetic pair of chroniclers may have used – is telling. American politics has been riven for years by conspiracy theories, by rumors of a deep state controlled by the immoral and powerful and the need for swamps to be drained in order for America to be made great again. Those who are not fully paid-up MAGA supporters may look at this with a degree of detachment, even skepticism, but the evidence presented in Original Sin is that lies were told to the American people, over and over again, and that Biden and his party reaped what they sowed. 

The question now is whether the word of any conventional political will ever be trusted again, or whether the United States will move into a new era of strongman vs strongman, with the legacy of Biden, that bewildered, stubborn figure, as the last “conventional” president tattered and forever tainted. On this evidence, the latter looks distinctly likely.