Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the ‘Original Sin’ Controversy

Journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” has generated massive coverage – and pushback – since its release in May. Some Democrats say it’s not time to focus on the past, amid the turmoil of the current administration. But Tapper and Thompson say that, “journalism about Biden does not excuse or normalize any actions and statements by anyone else, including the forty-fifth and now forty-seventh president.” We’ll talk with the authors about the controversy, the alleged “cover-up” of Biden’s decline and why they say a reckoning is needed for the future of the Democratic party.

Show Transcript

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. It’s been less than a year since many Democratic voters watched with concern—then shock—as a shuffling president Joe Biden appeared to lose his train of thought on a question about the national debt during his first debate with then–candidate Donald Trump. Jake Tapper moderated that CNN debate. And now together with Axios national political correspondent, Alex Thompson, has written a new book about how the public could have been so taken by surprise by what they witnessed on camera and what lessons to learn from that moment. Their new book is called “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Coverup, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” Welcome to Forum, Alex.

Alex Thompson: Thanks so much for having me.

Mina Kim: And welcome to you, Jake.

Jake Tapper: It’s great to be here. Thanks, Mina.

Mina Kim: So, Jake, I learned from the book that when you saw Biden stumble like that on the debate stage, just feet away from you, that you typed to the control room on your iPad, “holy smokes.”

Jake Tapper: Yeah. I mean, it wasn’t just the shuffling. It was that answer that you just played a clip of, which I still find shocking, and I’ve now heard it a dozen times during this book tour. And it’s still just so painful, because it is somebody who has no business being on that stage, somebody who is nonfunctioning. And, look, we all lose our train of thought. We all forget names. You know, we’re human, we’re fallible. But what Alex and I set out to do after the election was over was find out how often did that nonfunctioning Joe Biden rear his head behind the scenes before the night of that debate. And, we interviewed more than 200 people, and we were shocked.

Mina Kim: Yeah. Alex, you’d been trying to raise awareness of Biden’s possible decline. But even for you, was that moment pretty surprising?

Alex Thompson: Oh, yeah. I mean, I had been reporting since 2021, but especially starting in 2023, about basically the ways the White House apparatus was adapting to his limitations. You know, a lot of people were talking about his age as a political liability, as, like, you know, will it hurt him in the election? But what I was trying to report is how the White House was dealing with the limitations on his energy, the schedule, his physical decline. You know, you could see it in the shuffle and the way he walked. But the White House was clear there was a concerted attempt, because I think the book clearly shows that the Biden we saw on the debate stage, it was not the first time he acted that way. And that wasn’t even close the first time. And that especially in the period about, like, eight to nine months before the debate, there were increasingly frantic efforts to shield him and shield that debate Biden, not just from the public, but even from their own staff, from their own cabinet.

Mina Kim: Right. So by whom? Who are the people closest to him who would have known the state that he was in and that he needed all of those, I guess, essentially, reinforcements, readjustments, and so on?

Alex Thompson: I mean, first and foremost is his family. So you’re talking about Jill Biden and Hunter Biden. And then beyond that, you have basically the closest staff, what some people in the administration called the Politburo, which would be Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed — Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer as well. But basically, people that had been with him for a long time and controlled access to him, controlled, you know, what decisions made their way to him and how they were presented. And then I’d say there’s another sort of outer layer of that, which would be Jill’s chief of staff, arguably almost inarguably the most powerful chief of staff to a first lady perhaps ever in history, given how much control they had over personnel, the schedule events, and Annie Tomassini, who was sort of Jen O’Malley Dillon’s deputy but on Biden’s side.

Mina Kim: So, Jake, could you help me better understand specifically what were some of the ways that they were trying to compensate for Biden’s physical and cognitive changes?

Jake Tapper: Some of it started out innocently enough, with the way that any staffer would want to try to help any president or primary politician appear his best—note cards and teleprompters, for example. Or as Alex was first to report, limiting his public appearances generally speaking to between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. So, you know, and that’s almost understandable. He’s, you know, 81 before the debate, and you would want somebody to be at their best. Any staff would want their politician to look their best. But those aids soon became crutches. So it’s very unusual for a politician at a fundraiser in front of, you know, 40–50 people to have a teleprompter. That’s just not normal. Any politician should be able to talk for 10–15 minutes to a small group of people. You can understand why you’d want a teleprompter for, you know, something being televised before the world—a major address or at least even remarks—but for just private comments is strange. But that was already happening in early 2023. And then by the end of 2023, there’s a tech cabinet meeting in October 2023, and that’s the last cabinet meeting for almost a year. And there are efforts being made, and we talked to White House officials who acknowledge this—one of whom left the White House because of this. There are efforts to hide him from people. So the cabinet doesn’t meet with him. Or if they do, it’s very limited. One cabinet official we spoke with said that they had a meeting with President Biden between the October 2023 cabinet meeting and the debate in June, and he seemed completely disoriented, completely out of it. Another cabinet official said that they thought by the end of the Biden presidency, he wouldn’t be able to be relied upon for that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call in the middle of the night for a national security emergency. So there were efforts to hide that from not just the public and not just the press, but Democrats and cabinet officials and White House staff.

Mina Kim: Let me invite listeners into the conversation. What questions do you have for our guests today, Jake Tapper, CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent there, Alex Thompson, national political correspondent for Axios, co-authors of the new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Coverup, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again? Was there a moment that made you question whether Biden could effectively lead the country? One of the other things that you spent quite a bit of time talking about in your book is the lengths that they would go to really oppose people who presented a view of Joe Biden as frail. And you write in detail about the anger over Special Counsel Robert Hur, who was in charge of the investigation of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, and he described Biden in a February 2024 report as a “sympathetic, well meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Describe their reaction to that, Alex.

Alex Thompson: They tried to destroy Robert Hur’s career. They labeled him—a politically motivated right wing hack, essentially. The vice president, Kamala Harris, went out and used her own experience as a prosecutor in this state to suggest that he did a terrible job and tried to undermine his credibility. The entire apparatus of the Democratic Party essentially tried to undo what he had said. But even people at the White House at the time—I remember talking to somebody afterward, this is after Joe Biden dropped out—and they said, “You know, he said the thing. And once he said the thing, you couldn’t unsay it.” And people in the White House realized, even the ones that were more honest with themselves did, you know, think that what he said was true. But there was no room in that White House—particularly for even, you know, suggesting it or whispering it to anybody—because even suggesting it meant disloyalty. And so the White House essentially not just went to war over with Robert Hur, but with their own Justice Department, with the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to the point that Garland later seemed to realize that Joe Biden, while he made these big pronouncements that he wanted an independent Justice Department to reverse sort of the politicization of Trump’s Justice Department, Garland eventually came to believe that Joe Biden actually didn’t want that—that he wanted a politicized Justice Department protecting him and his family.

Mina Kim: Jake, the title of your book together uses the word “coverup.” So I’m wondering, did you feel like what they were doing rose to the level of, like, a conspiracy? You know, how do you define “coverup”?

Jake Tapper: Well, we talked about this diction at length, as you might imagine. And we did not use the word “conspiracy.” And we do use the word “coverup.” We’re not alleging criminality, but the definition of a coverup is when you are trying to hide something bad. And they were—and they did. And, I mean, the evidence of the fact that it was a coverup was the fact that billions of people were shocked by what happened on the debate stage that night. I mean, if it wasn’t a coverup, then why were we all so surprised?

Mina Kim: And what did you uncover in your reporting about sort of how they justified this coverup, if, as you say, it was so clear that this person probably didn’t have the capacity to be the president of the United States, a hugely demanding job for another four years?

Jake Tapper: Yeah. I think—and I’d be interested to hear if there are listeners who disagree—but the idea that Joe Biden was ready to be president until January twenty twenty-nine, which is what he was running for, is just a staggering thought. The idea of what they were doing to hide this was something that they could justify to themselves because this is how they looked at it: One, Joe Biden is the only person that’s ever beaten Donald Trump. Two, Joe Biden is therefore the only person that can beat Donald Trump. Three, Donald Trump is an existential threat to the American people and to the American way of life. Once you accept those three premises, which I personally do not accept, but once you accept them, you can justify almost anything in terms of supporting Joe Biden. And the truth is somebody from the Trump White House, after reading my book, asked me, “Did they think that he was gonna die in office in the second term? Like, what was their thinking?” And I think—and I think Alex agrees with me—I don’t think they thought past Election Day. I think they thought, “Let’s just get him to Election Day. Let’s just beat Trump, and we can worry about everything else after that.”

Mina Kim: We’re talking with journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson about their book on Joe Biden, and it’s called Original Sin. You, our listeners, can join the conversation. I’m wondering if there was a moment that made you question whether Biden could effectively lead the country, or if this incident changed your impression of the Democratic Party. What do you want to ask or tell the authors? What’s your reaction to them writing this book? And do you hope that the Democratic Party has learned some things? We’ll have more after the break. I’m Mina Kim.