CNN's Jake Tapper calls his new book a tragedy. Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which Tapper co-authored with Axios' Alex Thompson, describes two Joe Bidens.
"The first one is the one that everybody got to know during his vice presidency," Tapper says. "And the second one was kind of a non-functioning Joe Biden. ... And that non-functioning Biden would rear his head increasingly starting in, like, 2019, 2020. And then, as his term went on, more and more behind the scenes."
The book describes a president who failed to recognize longtime political allies, lost his train of thought in important conversations and forgot important dates, including the death of his son, Beau: "We in the public would see some of it in front of the cameras ... but we had no idea how bad it was," Tapper says.
Tapper says one source described a president that was being propped up by aides: "One person told us that the presidency was, at best, a five-person board with Joe Biden as chairman of the board."
The issue became part of a broader conversation during Biden's June 2024 debate with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Biden spoke haltingly, and struggled to articulate why he should be reelected to the office. Tapper, who moderated the debate, remembers wondering if he'd make it through all 90 minutes of the event. A month later, Biden withdrew from the presidential race.
Looking back now, Tapper says he regrets not covering Biden's decline more aggressively. "I can point to times where I asked him this or I asked them that ... but knowing what I know now, I barely scratched the surface," he says. "I need to run more towards the discomfort of questions about health because they're so important and they're so under-covered in Washington."
On Sunday, Biden's office issued a statement, revealing that the former president has been diagnosed with an "aggressive form" of prostate cancer, which has metastasized to the bone.
"It is very sad what happens to us, if we're lucky enough to get old. Very few of us retain our acuity until our death in our sleep at age 99," Tapper says. "It is the human condition, and that makes it difficult to report on this. But by the same token, we have a right to believe and expect that a president will be sharp and on top of things."
Interview highlights
On the timing of his book and Biden's recent cancer diagnosis
My heart goes out to him. My prayers are with him. I hope the hormone therapy for the cancer works. This is part and parcel of the story of Joe Biden. ... The book was written as a tragedy: Here is a person that has gone through so much in his life. So many horrible things fate has thrown at him from the very beginning of his life to today — and that instilled in him a spirit that so many people love, which is the guy who gets up after getting knocked down. And it also created a sort of theology around Biden where he could do anything. And that led to the situation we're in, if you take a step back, big picture: Donald Trump, the president, Republicans controlling the House and the Senate.
On the argument that the White House hid Biden's decline
Some of the ways in which they helped hide his deterioration started off innocently enough. I mean, any staffer wants to make a president or a senator or a governor look as good as possible. And if he wants note cards, if he wants a teleprompter, if he wants to do events in the middle of the day instead of early in the morning or late at night — that's all perfectly understandable. But then all of those things became crutches and started really infiltrating his presidency in a serious way to the point that even cabinet meetings, even after the cameras left, were highly scripted.
Then I think the real part of the cover-up comes with not just the fact that he's at 40- or 50-person fundraisers using a teleprompter, which is bizarre and unprecedented for a president who should be able to speak extemporaneously for 10 minutes. There's the fact they started cordoning him off from people in 2023. So members of Congress who went to the White House Christmas party in December 2022 didn't see him again in the flesh, many of them, until December 2023, and they were shocked at what they saw.
On the Biden team's aggressive response to critical coverage
It happened to me when I was reporting critically on Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. This is just politics in America today. White Houses, parties, have legions of influencers and bots and activists and journalists who agree with them, and those people, half the time you don't even need to give them an order, they'll just go after anybody. It's just par for the course. We cited it not to justify anything, but just to kind of explain the terrain on which journalists were trying to report anything about President Biden. … The White House is calling your story a lie or somebody from the White House threatens to go on the record and call your story a lie, that could be really intimidating. … It also serves as a warning shot for other journalists to not follow up on a story because they see how somebody else is getting raked over the coals, and they might not want to experience that.
On the Democratic Party's reaction to Biden's debate performance
Democrats were shocked. They were just absolutely stunned. And I think there were really two camps. There was the Biden camp, which was, "OK, how do we get out of this? How do we crawl back?" Because Joe Biden, as I said earlier, as a compliment, he cannot be defeated. That's his great attitude. He's not going to be defeated by brain aneurysms, by this tragedy, by that tragedy. …
You don't need to be a genius political consultant to know that the obvious remedy to fixing what he had just done was to go out and do 15 interviews and 20 town halls and five press conferences and just show people that he was as sharp as a tack as they had been saying. And the problem was he couldn't do that, and that's why his pollsters ultimately concluded there was just no way to get out of it. This was a disaster and it was going to keep getting worse and worse until election day.
On the Democratic reaction to George Clooney's New York Times op-ed, which called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race
They were shocked. After the debate everybody was talking about, "Who's going to say it?" Because very few people were coming forward publicly, even though the voters were clear and many members of the media were clear, a lot of Democratic officials kept quiet. … [The op-ed] had a huge impact because here's a guy [Clooney] who co-hosted the most successful Democratic fundraiser in presidential history. Thirty million dollars raised in one night. Here's a beloved figure who would only make enemies. You can only make enemies from such a thing. And he came out and he was gutsier here then most senators and governors and members of the House.
On the public's lack of trust in legacy media
The news media is in a crisis. … Reporters in general, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, all of us, people don't trust us. One of the reasons they don't trust us is what just happened with Joe Biden and his acuity and the fact that we in the media were pretty late to the story. I should [say], we in the legacy media were late to that story, because conservative media was not late to it. And I think that we are in an existential fight for a free press. Not that it's gonna be taken away, but it certainly runs the risk of not thriving as it has. And that just calls on us to be as good and professional as possible.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
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