Will the Democrats learn anything from the Biden decline cover-up?

As Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson kicked off the promo tour for Original Sin, their explosive new book exposing the far-reaching cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline during his final years in the White House, some tragic news broke regarding the former president’s health. Biden had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones. 

The revelation naturally generated sympathy. But it also gave rise to an argument that often accompanies tragedy in the lives of the powerful: that tough questions about their record should be shelved out of respect. David Axelrod, normally a clear-eyed analyst of the Democratic party’s weaknesses, said last weekend that commentary about Biden’s mental acuity “should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.” 

That sentiment, well-meaning as it may be, is unconvincing as an argument. If anything, questions around Biden’s insistence that he should have remained in the race and faced Donald Trump in the 2024 election to serve another four years in office are even more urgent considering the news that he’s been suffering from an aggressive cancer that has already metastasized. 

It is more urgent still in the light of the fact that our gerontocracy extends beyond the White House and into the halls of Congress. Three House Democrats have died in office just this year, the latest being Gerry Connolly of Virginia. Six have died in the last 13 months. Historically, such events prompt the chattering classes to demand a moratorium on criticism of Congress for its increasingly ancient demographics. On the contrary: what better time to point out that our elected leaders are too old than when its members are dropping like flies? 

Set aside how much Biden and his inner circle knew about his own diagnosis (They claim the cancer was only just found, but their track record for health transparency rivals FDR’s). We owe much to our public servants, but deferential coverage when they find themselves on the business end of debilitating illness is not one of them. Biden was, for four years in the last decade, the most powerful person on the planet. His decisions, like the decisions made by any president, cost and saved lives. They shaped the future of the country and the world. 

Tapper and Thompson’s book puts those decisions in stark relief. While the “original sin” of the title refers to Biden’s disastrous choice to run for re-election, which set off a chain of events that catapulted Trump back to the White House, an overlooked bombshell of the book is how it shows Biden’s slouch toward infirmity affecting his presidency. 

Tapper and Thompson report that the former president’s top aides – or the Politburo, as they were derisively known – insisted that up until his departure from office, his age never derailed his decision-making. The problems, they insist, were limited to his ability to communicate with the public – an obscenely low bar, given how crucial it is for a president to be able to communicate with the world. 

But Tapper and Thompson report on countless examples where Biden’s infirmity worsened his performance. “We have members of Congress talking about his inability to do his job,” Tapper told me in an interview this week. 

In 2023, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who backed Biden, feared that an administration plan to release inmates from the Guantanamo Bay prison to Oman in the wake of the October 7 attack would put the country at risk. 

“He has a conversation with Biden,” Tapper said of Warner. “He doesn’t think Biden has any idea what’s going on. He doesn’t understand this discussion.” 

In another incident as far back as 2021, Biden was supposed to encourage the House Democratic Caucus to back a piece of legislation, Tapper recounted. “He doesn’t do it. They bring him back again to do it; he doesn’t do it again.” 

Other more significant failures have been pinned on Biden’s decline. Many Democrats attribute his deferential handling of Benjamin Netanyahu as he carried out a brutal campaign in Gaza to an antiquated view of Israel. His catastrophic management of the US southern border is pinned, in Original Sin, on an inability to handle the job of being president. 

Take this bit of a reporting on an encounter between Biden and Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado at a White House immigration event in June 2024. “Biden has that horrifying glitch moment where you can’t really even understand what he’s doing,” Tapper recounted. “He does that thing, just like as a tool, he whispers when he wants to emphasize something. But this isn’t that. This is like some sort of glitch, and neurologists we talked to said this looked like a neurological event. Bennett leaves that event at the White House thinking, ‘Well, this is why our immigration policy is such a mess. The president cannot manage the portfolio. He’s not able to manage these competing interests and direct people as to what to do.’” 

Perhaps the greatest indictment of Biden in the last year of his presidency – one that lays waste to the farcical claim from his supporters that he could have served another four years in office – is that by the time of his 2024 campaign, his schedule had shrunk to a six-hour day, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the waking hours of a particularly lethargic infant. 

There isn’t public evidence of a case where Biden missed the 2 a.m. call, but does anyone –Biden dead-enders included – feel comfortable with a president who can’t be roused to take it when it comes? 

“We can’t have this as a country,” Tapper noted. “We have such a powerful executive branch, and at this stage, such an un-coequal legislative branch and such weak political parties. We’re really racing towards a very dangerous situation. What if there had been that 2 a.m. phone call for Joe Biden?” 

Democrats have spent the week complaining that coverage of Biden’s age is irrelevant; old news; offensive. It is an argument often advanced, but exclusively by partisans eager to shield their preferred political candidate from scrutiny. In doing so, they are repeating the same sins as Biden’s inner circle, covering their ears and ushering in the threat to democracy they claimed to be so worried about. At the last election, this ensured four more years of Trump. In 2028, Democrats shouldn’t be surprised if the same strategy bears the same result.