Original Sin

Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor, and Alex Thompson, an Axios reporter, argue that President Joe Biden's decision to seek reelection in 2024, combined with aggressive efforts by his inner circle to conceal his cognitive and physical decline, constituted the central catastrophe of the Democratic Party's loss to Donald Trump.

The book opens on the morning after the 2024 election. Biden woke convinced he was wronged, insisting polls showed he could have beaten Trump. His own pollsters confirm no such data existed. Two miles away, Vice President Kamala Harris gathered with family members, stunned by Trump's victory after a compressed 107-day campaign. David Plouffe, a former Obama campaign manager recruited to help the Harris effort, blamed Biden directly for the outcome.

The authors root Biden's refusal to step aside in a lifelong mythology of resilience. His father, Joseph Biden Sr., modeled perseverance through financial ruin, teaching his son to always get back up. Biden overcame childhood bullying over his stutter, won a long-shot Senate race at twenty-nine, survived the deaths of his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car crash, endured brain aneurysm surgeries in 1988, and lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015. For Biden's family and closest aides, this pattern became a near-religious faith in his ability to rise again, one in which skepticism was forbidden.

That faith was enforced by an unusually insular inner circle the authors call "the Politburo": senior adviser Mike Donilon, counselor Steve Ricchetti, and policy aide Bruce Reed, all of whom had worked with Biden for decades. The next ring included communications strategist Anita Dunn and her husband, lawyer Bob Bauer. Two loyal personal aides, Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal (the First Lady's top staffer), controlled access to the president. Together, these figures kept unflattering realities from reaching Biden or the broader public.

The authors identify early warning signs during the 2020 campaign, when Biden struggled to remember Donilon's name on a bus tour through Iowa. The COVID-19 pandemic proved, as Biden's own staff privately acknowledged, a gift to his candidacy: Lockdowns allowed him to campaign remotely with a lighter schedule. During the virtual Democratic National Convention, raw footage of Biden in conversations with ordinary Americans showed him unable to follow the discussion; a special team edited the material into a few airable minutes. Biden won the general election by seven million popular votes, though his Electoral College margin rested on roughly 43,000 votes across three states.

The authors chronicle Biden's presidency as a period of legislative accomplishment shadowed by accelerating decline. A bipartisan infrastructure bill represented a real achievement, but the chaotic August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan sank Biden's approval ratings into the thirties, where they remained. Behind the scenes, speechwriters shortened his remarks and simplified vocabulary. Cabinet meetings became heavily scripted. Biden's physician omitted cognitive testing from annual exams despite his age and visible lapses.

The reelection decision, the authors argue, was made with virtually no deliberation. No formal meeting occurred to weigh the risks of running at eighty-one. Donilon simply informed colleagues the president was running. When pollster John Anzalone called to discuss whether Biden should run, Dunn told him the decision was already made. Vice President Harris's perceived political weaknesses became an additional rationalization: The inner circle argued that if Biden did not run, Harris would become the nominee, and they had little confidence in her abilities. First Lady Jill Biden emerges in the authors' account as one of the chief supporters of the reelection bid and chief deniers of decline.

Throughout 2023, the deterioration steepened. During a trip to Ireland, Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley watched Biden become utterly drained after public events, reminding Quigley of his own father before his death from Parkinson's disease. Campaign video production became an ordeal: Biden frequently could not complete brief remarks without errors, and aides filmed with two cameras to disguise jump cuts. Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's mishandling of classified documents became a narrative turning point. When Hur interviewed the president in October 2023, Biden could not recall when he had been vice president and could not place the year of Beau's death. Hur's February 2024 report concluded that while Biden had almost certainly broken the law, no jury would convict "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The White House attacked Hur rather than address the substance of the findings.

Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips mounted a lonely insurgent primary challenge, but the Democratic National Committee (DNC) refused to sanction debates, and the party apparatus worked to shut him out. He suspended his campaign after Super Tuesday.

By mid-2024, Biden's decline was unmistakable in public. At a June D-Day commemoration in Normandy, House Democrats were shocked that Biden looked frailer than World War II veterans nearing one hundred. At a Los Angeles fundraiser on June 15, actor George Clooney was stunned when Biden did not recognize him. Former President Barack Obama, also present, watched Biden trail off incoherently before top donors and had to step in. Hunter Biden's conviction on three felony gun charges, following a trial that aired the family's darkest secrets, further damaged the president; top aides identified this period as one of his most precipitous stretches of decline.

The June 27 presidential debate proved the breaking point. Within the first eleven minutes, Biden lost his train of thought, made guttural sounds, and concluded one answer with the bewildering phrase "we finally beat Medicare." He botched his response on abortion rights by digressing into the unrelated murder of Laken Riley, and on immigration he lost his train of thought so completely that Trump responded, "I really don't know what he said at the end of that sentence."

The twenty-four days between the debate and Biden's withdrawal saw the Democratic coalition fracture. Biden's inner circle initially dismissed the fallout, but a cascade of officials called for him to step aside. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on television suggesting Biden had not yet decided whether to run, infuriating the White House. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer drove to Biden's Delaware home and told him his pollsters estimated only a 5 percent chance of winning and that Biden's closest advisers were not sharing the real data. On July 13, Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, further complicating the political landscape. On July 20, Donilon and Ricchetti presented Biden the full picture: Roughly two-thirds of congressional Democrats wanted him out, the party would be torn apart, and fundraising would collapse. Biden decided to withdraw.

The next morning, Biden called Harris and told her he was dropping out. He endorsed her in a separate statement minutes later. Obama withheld his endorsement briefly, preferring the appearance of a process, but joined by week's end. Harris locked up the delegates by Monday evening.

Harris's 107-day campaign brought the race within striking distance, but she could not escape Biden's shadow. She refused to distance herself from his record, telling The View there was "not a thing that comes to mind" she would have done differently. Biden committed several unhelpful acts during the fall, including wearing a Trump hat at a September 11 event and calling Trump's supporters "garbage," undercutting Harris's planned speech about national unity. Harris lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the so-called Blue Wall states, by a combined roughly 230,000 votes.

In his final weeks in office, Biden pardoned Hunter for any crime committed over an eleven-year period, then preemptively pardoned his siblings and their spouses. The authors close by noting that Biden had pledged in 2020 to be "totally transparent" about his health and observe simply: "He was not." They call for Congress to legally require the president's physician to certify the commander in chief's physical and cognitive fitness, arguing that without such a structural reform, no president can be counted on to be fully open.