Mission: Impossible, Reckoning with the Internet
May 23, 2025
There is no other rational response to the cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline and infirmity than anger.
If you’re an American, it should make you angry that the many people who knew better stayed silent about, even actively conspired to hide, the fact that Biden wasn’t actually capable of executing his responsibilities as president, handing untold amounts of power to a cabal of advisors you never voted for.
And if you’re a Democratic voter, it should make you angry that a party that spent years promising they would, at very least, stop Donald Trump (and maybe not do much more), and that their blocking his reelection justified asking for your money and demanding your votes, ended up putting Trump in the White House again, in large part by installing and then keeping in power a man they knew was unfit for office.
Questions about Biden’s ill health, and who knew what about it and when, have been reignited in recent weeks, thanks to the release of two complementary books that have added new, scandalous details to the already scandalous litany of details about Biden’s condition that erupted after his disturbing June 2024 debate performance. One is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, the third in a trilogy of Trump-era behind-the-scenes campaign accounts by the pair that dropped last month; the other, which has been dominating political coverage the past couple of weeks, is Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, an autopsy of how Biden’s condition was hidden from the public for so long.
The other reason the issue has exploded yet again — just as the former president has stepped back into the public eye, while he gets ready to release his own, self-exculpatory book — is because we’ve just found out Biden has prostate cancer, and a particularly “aggressive” one at that, which has spread to his bones. Despite his spokesperson’s insistence that this was the first anyone knew about it, speculation has swirled that there may have been an effort to hide the diagnosis while he was president, fueled by the fact that Biden is the only president going back to Bill Clinton at least not to be tested for prostate cancer, that an oncologist who served as his own COVID advisor has called this “a little strange,” and this 2022 clip features Biden casually saying he has cancer.
Whether or not you buy into this speculation, at this point it’s a legitimate line of inquiry. It’s legitimate, because as both Fight and Original Sin show, Biden’s four years as president were defined by a vast, concerted effort by both the people closest to him and a constellation of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to, generously, keep what they knew about his deteriorating health from the public.
Time and again in Original Sin, the same story is told and retold: one of Biden’s advisors, allies, old friends, or donors interacts with him face to face; they are either alarmed by his frail and confused physical appearance, by the fact that he doesn’t know who they are, or by the fact that he’s seemingly unable to speak off the cuff without serious assistance; and they proceed to say and do nothing about it, or even double down in their public insistence that he’s never been better.
In many cases, it is elected officials in Biden’s own party who are horrified but too cowardly to speak up. And in both books, this cowardice continues, with only a few exceptions, well past the point where the entire country has seen the truth and it has become clear keeping him on would be a disaster.
It wasn’t always cowardice. The reporting by both pairs of authors establishes that the insular team of the president’s closest advisors — both longtime Biden loyalists and family members, all of whom became unhealthily enamored with the trappings of power — went to great lengths to disguise Biden’s decline. They made sure he was well made-up, had events scheduled only during certain hours, always had clear visual aids to help him walk from point A to B, was furnished with notes, teleprompters, and other assistance to help him speak, or that events where he was meant to interact with others, like cabinet meetings, were scripted in advance — though even that was not always enough.
In hindsight, many of the most cynical theories about what was going on in the Biden White House turned out to be true. Biden’s advisors closed ranks around him (“You can’t talk about this stuff. We’re backing Biden,” one alarmed Democrat was told), and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) abruptly rearranged the 2024 primary schedule, which nonsensically put South Carolina first, for the exact reason everyone said at the time: purely to put Biden in the best position of beating any challenger. And they worked to aggressively shut down any attempt to ask questions about, investigate, or expose his decline.
Thompson and Tapper report that Biden’s team enlisted a coalition of influencers, Democratic operatives, and loyalist media to publicly shame anyone looking into Biden’s condition and create a “disincentive structure” for them to do so, gave out talking points that were then dutifully used by allies, and at one point threatened to deny a Wall Street Journal reporter’s story on the matter to scare her away from going forward with it. Meanwhile, they kept Biden isolated from his colleagues, to the point that cabinet members went months without seeing him.
While Biden’s decline seems to have become markedly worse and more rapid over the course of 2023 and 2024, both books make clear, as other reporting has, that it started much earlier. Each recounts a disastrous late 2021 meeting that was meant to offer Biden a chance to persuade the Democratic caucus to pass his infrastructure bill, but saw the president instead ramble endlessly and leave the room without ever making the ask.
But Original Sin dates the start of it much earlier, with insiders noticing changes around the time his eldest son was dying in 2015. Biden’s brain “seemed to dissolve,” a senior White House official told the authors, while another insider said the death “aged him significantly.” He struggled to remember his longtime aide Mike Donilon’s name in 2019. And he was so bad in 2020 that the conversations with ordinary voters he filmed for that year’s Democratic convention required heavy, “creative” editing, with those who watched the raw footage left alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve as president.
For many readers, this won’t be a surprise, but a vindication of what they saw again and again during that year’s primary but were told to pay no mind to: pundits and rivals openly commenting on the difficulties he exhibited in debates; Biden forgetting Barack Obama’s name and the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, saying he was running for the Senate, and confusing two separate world leaders with the long-dead Margaret Thatcher; MSNBC anchor Nicole Wallace laughing and encouraging him through a disastrous interview like he was a preschooler; Biden visibly gesturing for aides to scroll up on an off-screen teleprompter, openly reading off notes and sometimes still struggling to articulate a thought.
This problem hasn’t gone away with Biden’s exit. Elderly party officials’ insistence on clinging to power as long as possible has had other real-world ramifications, including just this week, when the death of three septuagenarian Democrats in Congress over the past three months — including one who had cancer, but whom the party elevated to a leadership position over a younger member anyway — allowed Trump’s budget to pass the House. The party is currently trying to punish and remove the sole official, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg, who has called out this problem and suggested longtime incumbents should be primaried.
These revelations are shocking, but the concern is much bigger than mere party politics. One anecdote in particular drives home the kind of fire those who hid Biden’s deterioration were playing with.
One of the scariest moments in the Ukraine war happened after a particularly grueling week for the president, which saw him travel through three countries and end up too tired to even attend a closing dinner with G20 leaders and going to bed early. Hours later, rockets that Ukrainian officials falsely claimed were Russian landed in NATO member Poland’s territory, killing two people — and bringing the world dangerously close to World War III.
“That rest came in handy,” Tapper and Thompson write, since Biden had to quickly coordinate the international response.
It’s one of the rare insights we get into the running of Biden’s foreign policy, a subject mostly absent from both books, despite the fact that he was running at least two separate wars whose waking hours fell well outside the six-hour timeframe we are told he was most functional during. The reporting on Biden’s decline is largely based on the testimony of outsiders willing to talk about the glimpses they saw of it, and of how those closest to him worked to conceal it to hang on to power. Not surprisingly, those who did the concealing may not have been the most forthcoming sources.
This is not a story told through the eyes of his foreign policy team. National security advisor Jake Sullivan mostly hovers in the background in Original Sin, appearing next to Biden in meetings and trips or sitting with other advisors. He’s a focal point in only two anecdotes: in one, Biden can’t remember his name; in another, in a January 2024 meeting to get more military aid for Ukraine, he takes the lead after Biden stumbles through reading a bullet-pointed set of remarks that one attendee called “a shitshow.”
There is only one section of the book told from the point of view of longtime advisor and secretary of state Antony Blinken, and it takes care to mention how Blinken “continually witnessed the president fully able to meet the moment” behind the scenes. It’s an incongruous passage by that point, both because of the many tales leading up to it where people with far less contact are shocked by one of Biden’s increasingly common bad days, and because we’ve learned this is the stock talking point his team used to misleadingly reassure doubters he was fine.
Given how tightly Biden was cocooned, and the growing incentive for everyone involved to plead ignorance, it’s an open question if we’ll ever get anything close to the truth about how exactly Biden’s foreign policy came to be. That’s too bad, because by the end of his term, it made up the bulk of his presidency and was not only objectively a disaster and a moral stain on both himself and the country, but played a central role in unraveling his presidency.
Still, we get some hints. Again and again, we’re told that everything that came to Biden was filtered through a tight circle of advisors, that they presented information encouraging him to run for reelection without the counterarguments, and that they kept bad data from him and fed him wildly overoptimistic polling results that didn’t actually exist. At the peak of the post-debate crisis, Biden was so ignorant about Democrats’ concerns about him running that it led House Democratic Caucus chair Pete Aguilar to wonder “if Biden was being told the truth about anything.”
Biden’s own cabinet members told Thompson and Tapper that they abruptly lost access to him in 2024, that aside from national security officials like Blinken “the cabinet was kept at bay,” and that they suspected his advisors were cloistering a president who, in the few times he was seen, appeared “disoriented” — all to feed him only the information they wanted him to know and to shape his decision-making.
At their heart, neither Fight, nor Original Sin, nor the scandal itself are really about Biden’s infirmity. The United States is not the first country, and the Democrats are not the first party, to wind up with a leader who is unfit, unpopular, and incapable of continuing to lead. But other political parties are able to swiftly and ruthlessly change their leadership when the time comes.
Not so in the case of the Democrats, who the four authors show not only struggled to do anything about Biden even when they knew full well he was taking them all off a cliff, but then begrudgingly replaced him with a leader they had equally little faith in. That speaks to a dysfunction at the core of the party that’s much bigger than one sick leader.
Common to both books is a broad, behind-the-scenes consensus within the party that Kamala Harris, the most likely person to replace Biden on the ticket, was, even with her youth and full health, nearly as much of a disaster as her addled boss. Harris’s weaknesses as a politician are well known now after being put in the harsh glare of the 2024 campaign, but the reporting gives us new details: her need to prepare for everything to the point that her staff did a mock simulation of an upcoming off-the-record dinner with socialites, according to Thompson and Tapper; or the fact that, according to Parnes and Allen, Harris wasn’t able to come up with a bold economic vision to campaign on in part because she struggled to grasp economic issues — “Wall Street jargon hit her ears like a foreign language,” they write. The party had such little confidence in her, her candidacy was repeatedly used as a potent threat to ward off efforts to roll Biden.
And yet, as each book recounts, she quickly locked up full party support anyway, and Democrats simply swapped out one candidate they desperately didn’t want for another. Part of it was the same cowardice that paralyzed them to move against Biden. Another part was Biden’s ego, the president quickly agreeing to endorse her to validate his own political judgement.
Still another was the crude and shallow style of identity politics that, for all their attempts to pin it on the Left after the election, has always been most dominant among the party’s corporate elite: the Clintons still wanted to see a woman become president and quickly backed Harris; key leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Jim Clyburn wouldn’t countenance letting the party pass over the first black, female vice president; while others feared that doing so would lose them African-American votes.
But maybe most important was the party’s ironically undemocratic nature, and its willingness to use that to stop a leftward shift. The true original sin of the entire, cascading crisis around Biden — his infirmity, the crisis of confidence in the party it caused, his saddling of the party with a weak successor, his final, fatal extraction from her to promise not to break from him — wasn’t really Biden’s decision to run again. It had been the Democratic establishment’s desperation to stop Bernie Sanders and his movement from taking over the party in 2020, something they could only do by saddling themselves with a man whose political abilities many of them had little faith in.
But it was worth it: Several high-profile Democrats have since come out and openly admitted they had gone with Biden only as a last-minute play to stop Sanders, and as Parnes and Allen had reported four years ago, for many of the party’s establishment centrists, “their fears of losing their party to socialism competed with their fears of Trump winning a second term.”
After 2020, establishment Democrats thought they had escaped the consequences for this, with the pandemic’s onset luckily giving them the perfect excuse to keep Biden out of the public eye as much as possible while still kneecapping Trump’s reelection chances. In hindsight, we can see they only delayed them.
The other side effect of having won their war on progressives: this same machinery was then used to stick Democrats with Harris. In Fight, Allen and Parnes write that Biden, the Clintons, and a group of centrist black party officials that included Donna Brazile — infamous for secretly feeding Clinton debate questions in advance while working for CNN during the 2016 primaries — had rebuilt the party infrastructure post-Obama and installed loyalists at national and state committees, to protect any future Biden or Harris run, but also in a way that was “designed to stop the party’s left wing from taking control.”
They recount how after Biden’s exit, as many in the party pushed for some kind of contest to choose the best possible candidate, these loyalists in state party chair positions moved quickly to prevent that from happening by putting out a unanimous endorsement of Harris. As one of them put it, “this has got to feel like it came from the base of the party, the grassroots side of things.” (One of those involved, Ken Martin, was just elected chair of the DNC this past February.)
They got exactly what they wanted: the candidate they worked to install ran a campaign where she personally refused to sever herself from the unpopular incumbent, was deathly afraid of interviews and speaking off-script, and couldn’t overrule her nickel-and-diming advisors to present a bold and exciting economic pitch, all of which sunk her. As a result, Democrats have not only been thrown back into the minority and face the exact kind of authoritarian intimidation they warned they had to beat Trump at all costs to stop, but are, for the first time in modern memory, immensely unpopular with their own voter base.
You would think this might have been a learning experience. Not for the Democratic establishment, whose members quickly scrambled to blame — what else? — the progressive left for their own failure, spent the months since thinking their comeback lay in posturing as socially conservative or trying to bankroll podcasters, and have been soothing themselves that they will win the 2026 midterms by default, even if they’re loathed by voters.
The careerism, elite myopia, and poor judgement that led the party establishment to run an ailing man the entire country could see was plainly unfit to be president don’t seem to have gone anywhere. If the electoral disaster they knowingly created for themselves wasn’t enough to force a meaningful change, it’s hard to know what will.
Great Job Branko Marcetic & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
