It was fairly obvious to critics of the Biden administration that the president was in cognitive decline and increasingly unfit to hold office, despite the barrage of Sharp as a Tack! statements emanating from DC’s faithful handmaidens, the corporate press. I picked this up not to learn what anyone who wasn’t rallying around the flag already knew, but to learn how culpable Biden was in the charade: was he the one insisting on running despite his increasing lapses, or was he cruelly used by the Democratic honchos or his wife? Was Biden threatened with Amendment 25 after the sad spectacle that was the Trump-Biden debate? Also on the table, at least for me: if Biden was incapable of running things, who was doing the running? As with the existence of a secret cabal of White House staffers who were interfering with Trump’s first term in office, the idea of unelected officials running government makes me — and should make any American — want to round up some tar and feathers. The book manages to be both sympathetic and critical of Biden, and places the blame squarely on his, his wife’s, and his inner circle’s shoulders, based on a series of interviews with un-named contributors. The result is something like Fire and Fury: interesting, informative to a degree, but ultimately a bit suspect.

The last ten years have not been kind to Biden: the death of his eldest son and heir-apparent in May 2015 rapidly aged him, and is blamed by his closest staffers for accelerating his cognitive decline — decline already evident in 2017 tapes, obvious during the 2020 election, and a growing cause for concern among those having to edit video during the nation’s first phoned-in election. These gave plenty of fodder for Republicans to mock, just as the Democrats used Dubya’s.penchant for malaprops against him. While it’s true that isolated clips could be collected and promoted to render a biased message, with Biden, his moments of confusion were increasingly a serious problem. The abnormal conditions of the 2020 elections, with campaigning being more virtual, helped mitigate the effect these moments would have on his campaign, and the effects a physical campaign might have on him.The cognitive stalls were not just a problem not just from an optics point of view, but for an operational point of view: Biden started stumbling through caucus meetings, forgetting to push for the legislation he was there to promote, and this was done under the full view of Peloisi, the then-leader of the Democratic party. Worse: while Dubya’s gaffes were at worst amusing, Biden tended to do things like openly call China’s dictator Xi a dictator, or declare that yep, DC was all-in on war to defend Taiwan: this necessitated DC dispatching officials to China to perform the necessary mea culpa’s. (I use Dubya and not Trump as my counter-example because Donnie’s threats to annex Greenland or turn Canada into the “51st state” are on another level than gaffe.) In office, Biden surrounded himself with a small coterie of close aides who called themselves the Politburo, meaning he was sheltered and cocooned even more than most presidents are. By 2022, the White House’s operations were actively reworking themselves around Biden’s cognitive limitations: reduced windows of when he might attend events, speeches being shortened and simplified, appearances being limited. This would only increase until that emperor-has-no-clothes moment where Biden’s mental fraility made itself undeniably obvious on the world’s stage, debating with Trump and getting into side arguments about golf handicaps. The debate night was, of course, the end for Biden, sending the DNC into panic mod and resulting in him being pressured to drop out and cede his place to Harris. The rest is history.

As much as I disliked Biden’s policies in office, his increasing mental limitations made me wonder, in 2023-2024, how much he was actually responsible for them and how much whoever was running things was. Original Sin is revealing and showing how influential the Politburo was, scripting interviews and even cabinet meetings. This same group was part of a reality distortion field: while the Bidens had a habit of ignoring ugly facts and pushing forward in faith — not letting negativity cause hesitation — the politburo were around Biden so much that his yearly decline became inwardly normalized. They became used to arranging the operations of the office to take his increasing infirmity in mind. It was outsiders who would get a view of how his function had declined and come away staggered — and evidently, it was outsiders like Biden’s political critics who could see the obvious. Were the DNC not watching the videos of Biden mentally shutting down, of having to have every single thing he did on stage written down on a card for him, etc?

This book is informative, but I don’t think it tells anywhere near the full story. There’s no mention of the autopen, for instance, and no accounting for the hostility Biden exhibited towards the DNC leadership after he was pressured into resigning. The Biden depicted here is sad and reluctant to make the decision, but he does so after funding dries up and the party leadership tells him he has to step down for the greater good. At least one person who is named in the book is now saying that the quote attributed to him was entirely fabricated. The book strikes me as a gentle scapegoating: it wasn’t the party who erred in not acting more forcefully, it was sad ol’ Joe who just didn’t realize it was time to go, and who was irresponsibly abetted in that by advisors who loved him too much for his own good.

Quotes:

“The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye,” Orwell went on. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
Here is what was in front of our noses.

The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving “my word as a Biden,” but they had another, more private saying: “Never call a fat person fat.” It wasn’t just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts. “Don’t say mean truths” is how someone close to the family put it.
“The Bidens’ greatest strength is living in their own reality,” this person told us. “And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn’t going to die. Hunter’s sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the narrative and repeat it.”

From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to
admit that Biden was declining.

He’s nearly eighty, he knows what he wants, and we know how to handle him—that was the message sent internally.
All of these factors led to a uniquely small and loyal inner circle. Some felt that the insularity was the Politburo’s way of protecting its influence. “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.

“Before Beau died, he was one hundred percent sharper,” said one senior Biden White House official. “Beau’s death wrecked him. Part of him died that never came back after Beau died. Was he the same guy he was in 2009? Of course not.”

Some cabinet secretaries felt that, in fact, Biden relied on the cards more
heavily when reporters were absent. […]

“The cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable—and
they were from the beginning,” Cabinet Secretary Number One told us. “I
don’t recall a great cabinet meeting in terms of his presence. They were so
scripted.”
[…]
Cabinet Secretary Number Two said they hated “the scripts” for the cabinet meetings. “You want people to tell you the truth and have a real dialogue, and those meetings were not that.”

It was a situation unique in the history of the republic: Two candidates who both claimed to be running again for the sake of protecting the country from the other also had very real reason to run for the purpose of protecting themselves.

Even mentioning Biden’s age in the lead of a brief story on his COVID infection resulted in a White House official screaming at Shear, demanding that The Times remove his age because it wasn’t “relevant.”

“Access dropped off considerably in 2024, and I didn’t interact with him as much,” said Cabinet Secretary Number One. “I didn’t get an explanation.” Instead, the secretary would brief other senior White House aides, who then briefed the president. Cabinet Secretary Number One thought it strange and asked if it was a way of filtering out particular information so that his closest aides could brief him in the way they preferred.
“Yes, the president is ‘making the decisions,’ but if the inner circle is shaping them in such a way, is it really a decision? Are they leading him to something?” Cabinet Secretary Number One wondered.

One cabinet secretary believed that Biden’s limitations had given his aides more power to steer the administration. “If you had a twenty-years- younger Joe Biden, I think he would have been more on top of the issues and what was going on,” the cabinet secretary said.

“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Biden turned to Trump, mouth agape, a painful moment of split screen.
It wasn’t even twenty-two minutes into the ninety-minute debate.

Senior Democrats who had done work for Biden in 2024 later told us that they had watched the debate and wondered: Just who the hell is running the country?

After the interview, Harris was visibly angry with Cooper. He had been asking the questions the nation had been wondering, but she took it personally.
This ———- doesn’t treat me like the damn vice president of the United States, she said to colleagues. I thought we were better than that. (Is she aware of how big a nothingburger the VP slot is? A VP is only as big as their boss lets them and their will directs them to be. Dick Cheney was a sinister grey eminence, Pence and Harris were guys-in-back)

Hur told them that all he felt was sad. How could anyone look at Joe Biden at that debate and not feel bad?

Writing from a hotel room in Portugal, Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman said the performance had made him weep. “I cannot remember a more heartbreaking moment in American presidential campaign politics in my lifetime,” he wrote, “precisely because of what it revealed: Joe Biden, a good man and a good president, has no business running for re-election.”
He “clearly is not any longer” up to the job, Friedman concluded.

“We can’t get out there and say, ‘Four more years,’ ” Kuster remarked. “I don’t know if we can say, ‘Four more months.’ ”

“Do you think Kamala can win?” Biden asked.
“I don’t know if she can win,” Schumer said. “I just know that you cannot.”

The image of Trump bloodied but standing defiant, fist in the air, after a bullet grazed his ear would be one of the most memorable of the year. Looking at that photo, Biden campaign aides couldn’t help but think of how this would help Trump politically. “[—-!]” more than a few said.

“Well, if anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Hostin followed up.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris said, in perhaps the worst moment of her short campaign.