Review of ORIGINAL SIN
Biden’s decline was at least as bad as you thought it was
Tl;dr – Good, quick read with well-reported information about the rapid decline of President Biden during his term as the 46th president of the U.S. I find that this book, which paints a very dim picture of Biden’s abilities during the presidency, has more credibility given that it’s coming from two CNN contributors, a left-leaning major news network.
The June 2024 debate between president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump was a disaster for the Democratic party. It put on full display what everyone was not quite saying out loud: Joe Biden was cognitively unfit to be the president of the United States. Calls for him to drop out promptly followed. He did not do so for over three weeks. There was no primary process to pick a replacement. Vice President Kamala Harris lost the general election to Donald Trump in November.
This series of events is well known to anyone paying attention to U.S. politics. But what really happened behind the closed doors and government staff during his term? Wasn’t it clear that he was cognitively declining – rapidly? What happened? In Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take you behind the scenes with interviews from 200+ DC staffers with inside knowledge of the attempt to keep Biden in office.
Original Sin casts a bright light on just how bad Biden was doing, especially in the last two years of his term. The reporting from Tapper and Thompson shows that Biden was holding minimal meetings with staff – fewer than any modern president; he relied on note cards for the few cabinet meetings he did run and teleprompters for even the smallest donor events; he appeared in few public events and the ones that he did were forced between optimal functioning hours mid-day; he had a very small circle of staff who had regular access to him; Jill Biden led him around like a guide dog and praised him like a toddler for doing the most basic of tasks.
It was not good. And everyone seemed to know it, but no one said anything because the alternative – Donald Trump being re-elected president – was so much worse.
Even after the debate where his deficiencies were on full display to the American public, Biden refused to drop out. And rather than doing anything to counter the media narrative about his abilities that grew like a wild fire after the debate, he remained secluded because he couldn’t do anything. It wasn’t a bad night, it wasn’t because he had a cold, it was because he was mentally unfit to be doing his job.
In the three weeks between the debate and him finally dropping out, his internal circle kept Biden sheltered from the reality of the situation. Every poll number was framed in the positive, hidden, or lied about. When the pressure became overwhelming and he finally did drop out, he immediately endorsed Kamala with their teams already securing the needed delegates, thereby circumventing a democratic primary process. Probably anyone in that situation would have been doomed.
Biden’s historic age – and the pressure to keep him in office despite that fact – is a symptom of larger problems in our politics. We all can see the ridiculously old age of the representatives and senators in congress. Our electoral system doesn’t reward new or moderate. Despite the voters saying Biden’s age was an insurmountable obstacle to them voting for him, we constantly keep electing and re-electing people that we would hire to do literally no other job in our country.
I liked this book. It was a good listen. I particularly enjoy reporter-read audio books because they are typically trained in the “news” voice which makes it feel like you’re watching the news the whole time. The meat of the book, probably at least half of it, was focused on the period of time between the debate and him dropping out. My only complaint was that the book felt a bit confusing in its order. It was mostly chronological, especially the part focused on the timeline from the debate to the drop out, but in the early chapters I was often confused on what year or specific time they were referring to. Overall this is a good book for the politically interested. An easy, if disheartening, read.
Reader poll
Published: May 2025
Publisher: Penguin Press
Format: Audio
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder | Read my review
Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018) by Jonah Goldberg
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Review of ON TYRANNY
Tl;dr – This is a great, one- to two- sitting read. Great because it is alarming, prescient, and important. If we are to take seriously what is currently happening in the US, we would be wise to not try and fool ourselves and rationalize the red flags that should be going off in everyone’s mind.