The first time I realized that Joe Biden might not be playing with a full deck was in 2014 when he addressed an LGBTQ+ rights group. Explaining his 2012 epiphany in support of same-sex marriage, the then-vice president recalled an incident when his father drove him into Wilmington, Delaware for a job interview. “We stopped at a red light,” Biden said. “I looked over to my left, and there were two men kissing good-bye, and I looked, and it was the first time I’d seen that. And my father looked at me and said, ‘They love each other.’” In retelling this anecdote, Biden pinpointed the year as 1961.
One doesn’t need to be an historian of the gay American experience (like me) to suspect that this story was, as Biden himself might say, “malarkey.” In 1961, homosexuality was illegal in every state of the union (Delaware would not decriminalize it until 1973), diagnosed as a mental illness and categorized as a national security threat. The chance that a young Joe Biden randomly encountered two “well-dressed” men kissing in broad daylight in downtown Wilmington on their way to work in 1961 is close to zero.
This impression of Biden’s diminishing mental acuity was compounded by the fact that he had simultaneously recited a significantly different version of the story. In an interview with the New York Times published just three weeks before his speech, Biden said it was one of his sons who had seen the men kissing and that it was he who nonchalantly said, “They love each other.” Despite this version being more plausible, it was the implausible one involving his father that Biden would repeat on multiple occasions.
Episodes like this, which occurred years before Biden decided to run for president in 2020, are important to remember in light of the historical revisionism that the former president’s partisans and their media sycophants have been promoting since the disastrous debate performance that drove him from the 2024 election campaign. In this alternate universe, Biden was a sharp and capable commander-in-chief at worst prone to logorrhea. Those who suggested otherwise were “ageist” enemies of democracy promoting deceptively edited “cheap fake” videos of Biden to aid and abet Donald Trump. For these diehards, still sticking to their guns in the manner of Japanese holdouts discovered on uninhabited islands decades after the Second World War, Biden’s parley with Trump was not a catastrophe the likes of which had not been seen since the advent of televised presidential debates, but merely a “bad night.”
The former president’s deterioration and the effort to hide it from the public feature prominently in three recent tomes about the 2024 campaign: Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by the veteran campaign book-writing duo Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple; and, most sensationally, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The first two focus more squarely on Biden’s ill-fated reelection campaign, while the third, which publishes this week, zeroes in on the cover-up itself. While each book has its individual strengths, revelations and insights, reading them together paints a powerful picture of a presidency in dangerous denial. The impression that the president’s true condition was being kept under wraps was only heighted by the news last weekend that Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, an illness that usually takes years to progress.
Of course, well into the second Trump administration, readers have every right to also question the timing of these books, published long after their revelations could have made a difference to recent history. But better late than never.
The “Original Sin” of Tapper and Thompson’s title refers to Biden’s decision to seek reelection, a choice that surprised many Democrats when his aides started confirming it not long after he was elected in 2020. In December 2019, while Biden was vying for his party’s presidential nomination and four months before he vaguely promised to be a “bridge” to a new “generation of leaders,” four Biden advisers told POLITICO that it was virtually inconceivable he would run for reelection in 2024. Biden’s decline was apparent to his inner circle before the 2020 Democratic Convention, in which, given the pandemic, his participation would consist mostly of pre-taped videos. Even this undemanding medium proved onerous for the then 77-year-old, whose performance speaking virtually with real Americans was, according to two aides, “horrible” as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Despite being edited by some of the best people in the business, little of the material was usable.
The morbid observation by some Biden aides that the pandemic, while terrible for the world, was an enormous boon for their campaign, was entirely accurate. With Biden granted a plausible excuse to avoid active campaigning, the American people were shielded from the physical and mental regression that would become increasingly apparent as the country opened up. And once he entered the White House, it was visible to anyone who saw him up close. “The cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable — and they were from the beginning,” a cabinet secretary told Tapper and Thompson, one of four to speak anonymously with the authors. In October 2021, when Biden addressed the Democratic House caucus in an effort to win their support for an infrastructure package, one member described his 30-minute speech as “incomprehensible.” According to Allen and Parnes, Vice President Kamala Harris’ communications director eventually drew up a spreadsheet listing judges across the country who could administer her the oath of office in the event Biden died.
According to all three accounts, 2023 was the year Biden’s deterioration became undeniable. It was also the year he formally announced his decision to seek reelection, which brought his worrisome condition increasingly into the open. A television ad in which Biden would answer pre-screened questions from a handpicked audience had to be scrapped because none of the footage was usable. At small, intimate events with donors, Biden would avail himself of teleprompters, stop randomly in the middle of his speech and shake hands, and just as randomly start speaking again. That June, following an interview on MSNBC, Biden got up from the desk and wandered off the set as the cameras rolled. The following month at a White House picnic, Biden didn’t recognize Congressman Eric Swalwell, one of his opponents for the nomination. (To be fair to Biden, not recognizing Eric Swalwell is a point in his favor.)
Befitting an inner circle dubbed the “Politburo,” the Biden ascendancy in many ways resembled the Soviet Union in the early 1980s when three successive geriatric leaders died within as many years. The pathetic sight of Barack Obama fetching a spaced out Biden from the edge of the stage at a Hollywood fundraiser and leading him off into the wings recalls the videotaped spectacle of an enfeebled Konstantin Chernenko “voting” in a hospital room shoddily refashioned as a polling place. In one of the more disturbing revelations from Original Sin, White House residence aides were told that they no longer needed to staff the elevator and could leave work early because the proletarian Bidens didn’t like being waited on. The real motive, the authors suggest, was to expand a privacy buffer around the president and limit his exposure to household staff — the kind of move one can imagine in the palace of an aging dictator.
By August, 77 percent of Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said Biden was too old to seek reelection, numbers that Biden and his aides would have heeded had they truly cared about protecting American democracy from the threat of Donald Trump. Further validation of the public’s worries arrived the following February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel assigned to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, released his report. Though Hur, following a five hour-long deposition, found that Biden had “willfully” retained such documents, he did not recommend prosecution because the president would come across to a jury “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Tapper and Thompson reprint just a few of the over 250 pages of interview transcripts that led Hur to this conclusion. Throughout, Biden rambles aimlessly about the history of various pieces of furniture in his Delaware beach house, the Mongol invasion of Europe, pictures of his wife Jill in a bathing suit, and much else having absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand. As if to confirm Hur’s conclusion, Biden, in a testy press conference responding to the report, confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. Despite Biden exposing himself as a real-life Mr. Magoo, Democratic partisans rushed to his defense and smeared the special counsel. Former Attorney General Eric Holder vilified Hur, by all accounts a politically impartial public servant, as “extremely naïve or a partisan.” Then-congressman Adam Schiff, even more attention-hungry than usual given that he was running for Senate, confronted Hur at a hearing and accused him of intending to “ignite a political firestorm” with his entirely accurate description of the president’s fading memory.