Since this book was written we have learned Joe Biden has prostate cancer. The sad news was greeted with sympathy from all sides of the political divide, including Donald Trump. That would have been the response if, as president, Biden had declared in 2023 that he wasn’t going to run again on the basis of his age; there would have been lots of love, as there was at the start of George Clooney’s celebrated open letter to Biden in The New York Times telling him he loved him, but it was time to go.
But that didn’t happen, did it? We now have confirmation the President was in poor health physically as well as cognitively, but no one said so when it mattered. So, could it happen again?
We didn’t know how bad Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was either, though even when he was doolally Reagan put up a better show than Biden on good form
The answer, folks, is yes. The two authors’ conclusion is that unless the presidential doctor is obliged by law under threat of perjury to reveal salient facts about the President’s mental and physical condition, then we’re probably not going to find out the facts. Americans didn’t know how bad Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s was either, though even when he was doolally Reagan put up a better show than Biden on good form. And there was that celebrated quip by Dorothy Parker when she was told President Calvin Coolidge was dead: “How can they tell?”
There were lots of ways of telling Biden had lost it between 2020 and 2024, but until Clooney said so, the White House maintained the fiction that the President could string an argument together. And the White House press corps let them get away with it.
Biden’s men had a way of dealing with awkward journalists’ questions about his acuity, “enlisting a corps of social media influencers, progressive reporters and Democratic operatives to besmirch as biased those… investigating this line of inquiry”. We could have heard more about the progressive reporters who put outcomes before truth.
Authors Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson are senior correspondents for CNN; Tapper was a moderator of the Biden-Trump debate, so he had a front-row seat for that debacle. They interviewed 200 people including prominent Democrats. Few piped up when it mattered to say the emperor had no clothes and few marbles. Turns out you can fool quite a lot of the people quite a lot of the time because they are so willing to fool themselves.
Melanie McDonagh is a columnist and writer at The London Standard
Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, out now (£25, Cornerstone)
