“In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.” So reads the description of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Authored by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, the forthcoming book will suffer from the same fatal flaw as its subject. You could almost call it tragic.

Just as Joe Biden sought to hold onto power by covering up his health, the Washington press corps was largely doing the same — seeking to preserve their access by allowing the White House to control the narrative about Biden. That became untenable about 10 seconds into the first presidential debate. Tapper, unfortunately, was part of the problem.

Asked on his own network just this week why “we didn’t hear some of these details” from the press corps at the time, Tapper claimed he, Thompson, and “lots of other reporters” were “on the “case.” “But,” said Tapper, “the bottom line is the White House was lying not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to their own cabinet. They were lying to White House staffers, they were lying to Democrats in Congress about how bad things had gotten.”

Tapper also complained that Democrats would not share damning information for him to report “until after election day.” That’s almost certainly true, though it diminishes the book’s standing as a work of difficult journalism, especially now that Biden and his family are permanently out of power.

It’s great that we now know Biden’s aides considered putting him in a wheelchair and that he failed to recognise George Clooney, but all these stories are too little, too late. Tapper, unfortunately, failed to give the story its due significance at the time.

As early as 2019, Nate Silver noted that “Biden’s age is perhaps his biggest risk factor — bigger, in my view, than his policy positions.” Even Biden’s own campaign later conceded that he “faced age concerns in 2020 and still won.” During that cycle, several reports pointed out that Biden drew more scrutiny over his age than peers like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump — not because he was older, but because his gaffes often seemed less like quirks and more like signs of decline. As one Obama-era consultant put it to Politico, Biden’s age was “the 78-year-old elephant in the room.”

Tapper, though, aggressively shut down Lara Trump’s argument during the 2020 campaign that she was making a serious, substantiated claim about Biden’s “cognitive decline,” telling her that she had “absolutely no standing to diagnose” it. Again, voters and even a few honest Democrats had similar concerns, even back then.

In 2023, as those concerns mounted, Tapper hosted an interview with author Franklin Foer, who claimed Biden would pass a “mental acuity” test. Tapper replied, “Right. He’s sharp mentally. I think the question is physical, right? More so?”

In 2024, Tapper, to his credit, asked Rep. Adam Schiff about Democrats’ “outrage” over special counsel Robert Hur’s decision to label Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. “It doesn’t seem great, it’s not horrible,” Tapper said of Biden’s memory, later adding, “He does have issues here and there… it’s not disqualifying, but he does have some memory issues.” In both segments with Foer and Schiff, Tapper peddled enormous understatements — and within a year of the debate.

Original Sin, as Dave Weigel points out, seems to include the “emerging” conventional wisdom among Democrats, that Biden was sharp in 2022 but had declined precipitously by 2024, “fading badly after the midterms.” It may well be true — as Jon Favreau and George Clooney seem to have indicated to Tapper and Thompson — that Biden’s decline accelerated midway through his term.

But that decline started from what was already a low point, even according to some Democrats in 2020. It also reflected on the sitting president of the United States, not merely a presidential candidate.

The Wall Street Journal broke through with a story on this not long before Biden fell apart during his debate with Trump, but it’s remarkable that we consider this report an exception. This was a man who wanted another four years, yes, but it was also a man with the nuclear codes, who oversaw the military, whose daily work (or lack thereof) affected the lives of every American in millions of ways both big and small. Even when reporters finally started taking on this story, their volume of coverage was wildly disproportionate to the seriousness of the matter.

Reporters here in DC know the truth, which is that Biden was declining for years, but that his White House successfully threatened them into complicity. Reporting on the topic, for what it’s worth, also risked journalists being lumped in with Trump and the GOP, who were relentless in their attacks.

Let us consider again that Tapper and Thompson are framing this book as the living embodiment of a Greek tragedy in which “the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate.” Original Sin, as far as Tapper is concerned, looks a lot like that.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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