Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have recently published a book titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, interviews the authors of the said book. We learn several interesting things about Biden’s tumultuous final year in the White House – a year which paved the way for Donald Trump to reclaim the Presidency.
We learn that compared to the stuff we saw in front of the camera eg. Biden tripping onstage at the graduation ceremony at the Air Force Academy or Biden not being able to recognise George Clooney (somebody he’s known for decades apparently), what took place behind the scenes was far worse eg. in Dec 2022, Biden could not remember the name of one of his top 2 advisors.
Secondly, we learn that from late 2023 i.e. a year before the Presidential election, Biden was taking rest for long parts of the working day. Quoting from the New Yorker: “He spent a lot of time in the residence. And he would be on the phone, right? But we have months of the internal calendar, which is called the block calendar, which shows how much his schedule, especially beginning in late 2023, when he was not travelling, was restricted. There were some days when he would go to the residence, have dinner, and be down at 4:30 P.M.”
Thirdly, we learn that more than Biden’s decision-making, what really suffered was his communication: “One top aide said to us, “The job is making hard decisions and communicating them to the American people.” And this aide said, “He was always able to do No. 1. No. 2 was a struggle—and it got worse throughout his Presidency.” But No. 2 is huge. Yes, you want the person to be able to make good decisions, but they also need to persuade. The American people need to have faith in this person. Western leaders need to have faith in this person. And he lost a lot of that.”
Fourthly, because of Biden’s decline, most of his Cabinet meetings were scripted since 2021: “…this is something that came to us after the election—members of the Cabinet told us that they found the Cabinet meetings disturbing and frustrating. The White House would ask them, “Well, what are you going to ask? If he asks a certain question, what is your answer going to be?” And it wasn’t just when cameras or the press were brought in for a brief photo op. It was afterward, even. They described there being literal scripts, where the Cabinet meeting was a very scripted affair. And members of the Cabinet afterward came away feeling a little disturbed. And this was as early as 2021, but it became worse over time.”
Fifthly, we learn that in the few unscripted meetings that Biden had with his Secretaries, he was mumbly and incoherent. By 2023, Biden has lost the ability to speak extemporaneously.
Sixthly, we learn that Biden’s team was filled with “yes men” and people scared to give him any bad news: “Trump in his first term could be talked out of stuff. He’s now filled his second-term Administration with yes-men and -women. Obama could be talked out of things—not always. Obviously, everybody in that position has a huge ego and thinks they know best. But the point with Biden was such that I have never seen, until maybe the current Administration—an Administration where the President is so surrounded by people who will never tell him anything negative, ever, and in fact will block negative stuff from coming to him. In the first Trump term, [former Chief of Staff] John Kelly would block nonsense from getting to his desk—Breitbart stories or whatever—but the Biden people would block Cabinet secretaries from delivering news that would upset him. Think about the mind-set you have to have in the summer of 2023: Inflation within the last year was at nine per cent, and you take the most unpopular thing in the country, the economy, and stamp your name on it—Bidenomics. Think about the kind of silo you need to be in for that to happen. That’s the silo in which all of his acuity issues are ignored.”
The New Yorker article then goes on to discuss the bitching and the politicking amongst the Democrats as they watched a sub-par Biden take on Trump in 2024. The article also talks about other powerful US politicians who occupied high-office whilst suffering from degenerative mental conditions. If the world’s oldest democracy has no check on balance on the issue of degenerative mental conditions, one can only wonder what is going on in other democracies.
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