As more information is revealed about Joe Biden's decline in the forthcoming Tapper/Thompson book "Original Sin," the narrative being pushed by the mainstream press is that the signs weren't really noticeable by those close to him until 2022-2023.
It's something that was strongly implied well before any books came out on the subject, with former NBC News "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd saying a couple of weeks after the infamous June 2024 debate that he'd had a conversation with a senior cabinet secretary "two years ago" about Biden's cognitive health.
"This is one of those, you know, it’s the classic open secret, nonversation, right? It’s the story everybody knows and everybody was afraid to talk about," Todd talked about at the time after noting it was the unnamed cabinet secretary who initiated the conversation.
The problem with the 2022-2023 spin is that Biden was openly showing signs of decline well before that, with even some of his Democrat primary opponents openly making it an issue in the 2020 campaign.
As it turns out, there were figures within his 2020 campaign circle whose concerns steadily grew about his fitness to lead as time went on, something else that was revealed in the book, as recalled by Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper in a Twitter/X thread:
The authors report that in 2020, Biden's staffers tried to get videos of him speaking with voters about key issues on Zoom for campaign content. But “he couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” A special team was tasked with editing *hours of footage* into usable *minutes*. 3/ pic.twitter.com/EYhegLd26z
— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) May 16, 2025
Beyond the Zoom disaster, during Biden’s 2020 campaign aides said that “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” In at least one case, they resorted to a teleprompter with scripted questions for an interview. Again: in 2020. 6/
— Tyler Austin Harper (@Tyler_A_Harper) May 16, 2025
Harper also tweeted that "People close to Biden tell the authors that his deterioration first became noticeable in 2015. Tapper and Thompson point to tapes from 2017 that suggest 'Biden was really struggling' and 'his cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.'"
In other words, it "first became noticeable" when Biden was still Vice President of the United States.
Something else learned from the book was an apparent confirmation of what that cabinet secretary told Chuck Todd in 2022. Once Biden took office, "cabinet meetings were described as 'terrible and at times uncomfortable' from the onset. Biden used notecards. Canned responses."
"..by 2024, cabinet secretaries confessed he couldn’t be relied on in an emergency," Harper also shared from the book.
Perhaps most disturbingly, Harper provided a quote from a Biden aide who said the quiet part out loud about Biden's 2024 reelection campaign:
“He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”
Which, of course, meant that people who were not elected effectively would have been running the country, as many of us suspected was already happening.
And truth be told, despite the mountain of evidence confirming Biden was unfit to lead as president, let alone for another four years, had it not been for that debate performance, we still would have seen the media and Democrats keep pushing the "cheap fakes" talking point all the way until the election in an effort to do exactly as that aide suggested: get him back in the White House as a figurehead president while his handlers did all the work.
This is a massive scandal that should have been exposed by the media during Biden's time in office. Instead, they were active participants in it primarily because, as Chuck Todd conceded in April, many in the press were concerned that they'd be viewed as helping Donald Trump.
Though some of the information learned over the last couple of weeks has been illuminating, the fact that bad-faith actors like Jake Tapper are trying to profit off the cover-up that they helped perpetrate is nevertheless disgusting. If they think this is one way the media can win back the trust they lost over the last several decades, they are sorely mistaken.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Partial audio from Joe Biden's interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur has been released; you can hear it here.)
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