What The Hell America!

Halfway through King Lear, storm clouds gather, and Shakespeare’s protagonist rages, “You see me here, you gods, a poor old man, / As full of grief as age; wretched in both.” And so, the mental unraveling of one of literature’s greatest characters begins. That Lear starts to lose his mind in this moment, in Act II, is important: If he were mad from the jump, the cause of his eventual downfall would be medical, not moral, and the king would bear no responsibility for the catastrophe that greets his kingdom. Precisely because the aging ruler is of sound mind in Act I, during which he sets into motion the events that threaten his sanity and his life, the blame is his to bear in Act V, when he has lost both.

Last year, the United States went through a presidential election filled with Shakespearean echoes. As Joe Biden tottered and fell (literally as well as metaphorically), more than a few pundits compared him to Lear, a man who was ruined by age, pride, and the flattery of sycophants. That analogy is picked up by Original Sin, the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline, which was written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson and draws on hundreds of interviews. It features an epigraph from Lear, and its first chapter gives airing to the view that, like Lear, Biden bears responsibility for his country’s fate. Quoting a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, the title of that chapter is simply: “He Totally Fucked Us.”

Tapper and Thompson’s exposé joins a growing list of post-election appraisals blaming Biden for Harris’s loss. (I wrote one of these myself.) Yet the curious thing about the experience of reading Original Sin is that one comes away unable to lay the blame, or the majority of it anyway, at the feet of Scranton Joe. Here, the Lear analogy falls apart.

Original Sin suggests that, unlike Lear, who begins his rule flawed but with his mind intact, Biden may have been losing his grip before he took his oath of office. If this is true, Americans unwittingly voted for and were then led by a president who was not up to the job, a state of affairs that certain among the Biden faithful seemed committed to concealing. Tapper and Thompson studiously avoid saying this outright; to their credit, they do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail. The American people, however, must confront the possibility that the book raises: that we may not have had a president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White House, in 2017.

One might debate whether the former president can be held fully responsible for his disastrous reelection bid given his seemingly shaky mental acuity (which he continues to deny, saying that reports of his decline in office are “wrong”; Original Sin does not include his responses to any of the book’s allegations). Biden’s claims that he would have won a rematch with Donald Trump—which he reiterated in an appearance on The View last week—suggest that he is not fully tethered to political reality. But Original Sin leaves little doubt that his enablers, at least, understood what they were doing.  (Former first lady Jill Biden denies this as well. She said on The View that her husband was a “a great president”; though she did not mention Original Sin by name, she said, “The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.”)

Franklin Foer: How Biden destroyed his legacy

In an author’s note, Tapper and Thompson offer a forewarning: “Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here.” But rejecting the most extreme claims made about Biden’s acuity hardly puts to rest the question of whether he should have run in 2020. And the idea that Biden was fully capable of doing the job when he first took office is quite hard to square with the 300-odd pages of meticulous reporting that follow.

It is of course literally true that Biden could string two sentences together at the start of his presidency (and can now). But Original Sin makes clear that even before he launched his first campaign against Trump, Biden was struggling. The authors write, “Those close to him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015”—a decade ago. Tapper and Thompson point to recordings from 2017 of Biden speaking with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, which came to light six years later as part of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s inappropriate handling of classified information, suggested that the president had lost a mental step, or several. “He grasped to remember things, he sometimes had difficulty speaking, and he frequently lost his train of thought,” the authors write, describing the recordings and the special counsel’s sense of them. “Biden was really struggling in 2017,” Tapper and Thompson write, adding, “His cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.”

Three years later, on the presidential campaign trail, Biden’s struggles became more obvious to those around him. Tapper and Thompson report that, in 2020, members of Biden’s inner circle gave the candidate a teleprompter with scripted questions for a local-news interview. It was an apparent effort to work around his dwindling communicative and cognitive abilities: Aides lamented that even then, “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” The book’s most astounding previously unreported story from Biden’s 2020 campaign concerns his staff’s attempts to create videos of the candidate speaking with voters over Zoom. Tapper and Thompson’s description of this is worth quoting at length:

The authors go on to write, “Edited, the videos likely appeared fine to viewers, Biden no worse than any other senior on Zoom. But two of the Democrats who were involved in the films’ production together were dumbfounded. ‘I didn’t think he could be president,’ the second Democrat said. After what they’d seen, they couldn’t understand how Biden could be capable of doing the job.” (Two other top Democrats blamed the lousy footage on the awkwardness of Zoom.)

The idea that this same man, only a short time later, was able to reliably prosecute the duties of the position to which he was elected is hard to believe. Indeed, some incidents cataloged in Original Sin suggest that Biden may have been struggling to do the job even early in his term. Cabinet meetings were “terrible and at times uncomfortable,” one Cabinet secretary told the authors. “And they were from the beginning.” Biden relied on notecards and canned responses. (Some Biden aides told Tapper and Thompson that Cabinet meetings are stilted in every administration, and that Biden was more engaged in smaller meetings.)

In his term’s first year, the authors write in the book, the president met with the House Democratic Caucus, ostensibly to ask its members to vote for a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package. But after delivering prolix remarks that one congressperson characterized as “incomprehensible,” Biden did not make the ask—which many of the politicians present thought was a strategic decision. Later that month, then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked him to address the caucus once more, hoping that this time he would push for the package. Yet again, Biden dithered and prattled. And yet again, a Democratic congressperson told Tapper and Thompson, Biden’s address was “meandering and incoherent.” Biden did finish with a strong demand: “That’s all I gotta say … let’s get this done.” The only problem? The assembled politicians weren’t sure what exactly the president wanted done because he had, once more, neglected to ask them to do anything. According to Tapper and Thompson, Pelosi believed that this was another strategic omission on Biden’s part. A different member of the Democratic leadership told Tapper and Thompson that it might have been a memory lapse: “We wondered: Did he forget to make the ask, or is this just him being a super-safe politician? Between his stutter and aging, we were never quite clear on what, exactly, was going on.” The next year, he did seem to have trouble with his memory; in 2022, according to one witness, Biden found himself unable to remember the name of his own national security adviser, Jake Sullivan—“Steve,” he called him at least twice—or his communications director, Kate Bedingfield, whom he once resorted to calling “Press.”

Read: Why ‘late-regime’ presidencies fail

Biden’s limitations were also clear during a rambling interview with Special Counsel Hur in October 2023. It took place during the two days after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, which means that when Biden was ostensibly in charge of directing American foreign policy during a moment of profound geopolitical tension, the president was incapable of sitting through an interview without forgetting words and dates and going on rambling tangents. Rather than reacting with alarm to this fact, the White House mounted a pressure campaign against Attorney General Merrick Garland. As first reported by Politico, Biden insiders were furious that Garland hadn’t edited Hur’s observations about the president’s shoddy memory out of the classified-documents report, and most of Biden’s senior advisers reportedly believed that Garland would not continue in his role as AG during the president’s hypothetical second term.

One Biden campaign consultant referred to in the book, who was conducting focus groups around this time, found that voters were concerned that Biden’s apparent decline would put the country at risk: “Many of them were worried,” Tapper and Thompson write. “What if an international crisis unfolded in the middle of the night?” These voters were not the only ones having these morbid thoughts. “The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00am during an emergency,” Tapper and Thompson write. “Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.”

As some high-ranking Democrats quoted anonymously in the book put it to Tapper and Thompson after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump last June: “Just who the hell is running the country?” At least one unnamed source close to the Biden administration was willing to provide the authors with an answer. “Five people were running the country,” this insider said, seemingly referring to the president’s closest advisers. “And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board.”

Near the end of their book, Tapper and Thompson offer a glimpse into how powerful Democrats responded to the grim spectacle of Biden’s early-summer face-off with Trump. The authors describe a scene at the home of James Costos, an ambassador to Spain under Obama, where celebrities and politicians gathered to watch the debate. As a doddering Biden tanked onstage in front of some 50 million Americans, the film director and Democratic donor Rob Reiner became scared, then furious. “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy because of you!” he screamed, seeming to direct his ire at the closest thing to a Biden official in the room: Second gentleman Doug Emhoff.

What Reiner apparently failed to consider, but what Original Sin prompts readers to ask, is whether America’s democracy was already meaningfully diminished. Describing how some in Biden world justified propping him up for reelection in 2024, a longtime aide told Tapper and Thompson: “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.” In other words, before Biden stepped down from the race, the plan for some aides seemed to be to Weekend at Bernie’s a cognitively impaired president in the hopes that, upon winning a second term, he could be hidden from the public while unelected staff took care of the real business of governing. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too,” this aide offered as a way of justifying what was, by any reasonable metric, an effort to undermine democracy and defraud the American people.

The members of Biden’s staff weren’t the only ones comfortable with abandoning democratic norms. The former president enjoyed the support of the Democratic Party, which at his behest blew up the old primary schedule, putting South Carolina in the first slot. The ostensible justification was anti-racism and elevating voters of color in a heavily Black state. According to Tapper and Thompson, aides at both the White House and the Democratic National Committee admitted that “the main motivation was helping Joe Biden, not uplifting Black voters.” South Carolina was a strong state for Biden, and the thinking seemed to be that a steady performance there might put primary challengers to bed early. In other words, the DNC appeared to try its level best to tip the process in favor of reelecting a man who a majority of the public thought could not do the job.

Mark Leibovich: The lie Democrats are telling themselves

“Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak,” asks Kent in King Lear, “When power to flattery bows?” The nobleman is one of the only characters in Shakespeare’s play who gives the king honest advice, and who warns Lear that the course of action he has chosen is dictated by pride, the result of following those who tell him what he wants—not needs—to hear.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Original Sin is how few Kents populate its pages. Dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties. These people then sought to return Biden to that office for four more years, even if that meant the country would most likely have been quietly run by unelected aides. In a rational world, Congress would hold bipartisan hearings about how this happened and whether and to what extent Biden’s aides hid the truth from the public. Then again, in a rational world, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump—who has spent his first months back in office intentionally dismantling core institutions, flouting the law, and threatening the Constitution—would have been elected president in the first place.