How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump
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Was there a cover‑up of President Biden’s decline and why does it matter?
This episode is about a seemingly simple question. Was there a Joe Biden cover up? Like a lot of people, I was worried about Biden's age when he ran for president in 2020. So after he won, I found myself continuously asking top White House staffers, how's the president? How's he in meetings? What's his energy like? I always got the same answer. He's great, completely in command. His energy is amazing. These are people I'd known for a long time. I don't think they were lying to me. The harder question, in retrospect, was whether they were lying to themselves. The White House, I came to think, had created this false distinction in their minds. They would admit that privately, publicly even, that Biden couldn't communicate as he'd once been able to.
But that was just theatrics. The real work of the presidency, they always told me, it was decision-making. And it was in decision-making that they believed Biden shined. That never made sense to me. In what possible definition of the presidency, in what possible definition of running a reelection campaign, is the ability to communicate with the public, not core to the job? And how could you believe that that had degraded, but nothing else had? We all know the story from there. Biden's collapse in the presidential debate, the push to remove him from the ticket, Kamala Harris's sprint of a campaign, Donald Trump's return to the White House. And in the last couple of months, I feel like I've watched a new conventional wisdom solidify.
When I was writing pieces about how Biden shouldn't run again, I got raked over the coals. I will say it was definitely not something everybody believed. But now the argument is that everybody knew he was incapable of handling the job of the presidency, that they knew it and they were covering it up. Was there a cover-up? A cover-up would at least reveal a core of cold rationality to this system. It would mean that people dealing with Biden every single day, they knew the truth, they saw it clearly and decided to lie. That there were adults in the room, if only malign ones.
What does Jake Tapper’s book “Original Sin” reveal about Biden’s health and the decision to run again?
In a way, that would be more comforting than what I think actually happened. And so there are questions here that are relevant long beyond the Biden campaign. How do you see what is right in front of your eyes when you don't want to see it? How do you not let loyalty to a person, to a party, to a cause blind you? Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's new book, Original Sin, President Biden's decline, its coverup, and his disastrous choice to run again, is a reconstruction of what Democrats should have known and when they should have known it. Tapper is, of course, an anchor at CNN. He was co-moderator of that historic and, for Biden, disastrous presidential debate. Thompson had covered Biden at Axios. So I asked Tapper on the show to talk through what they learned in the more than 200 interviews behind that book and what lessons we can take from it.
And I wanted to start in a particular moment, the moment when I found my own doubts about Biden impossible to ignore any longer. And just to note, we taped this before the news of Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis. The episode isn't any less relevant. In fact, maybe it's more relevant. But of course, I want to say that we wish him well.
Jake Tapper, welcome to the show. It's great to be here. Thanks so much and congrats on all the success of
this. The prosecutor calls Biden a sort of well-meaning old man with a flagging memory. Something like that,
yeah. Which is nice, by the way. It's a nice description. It's not a mean description. It's an accurate, nice description. Well, at the
moment, it was taken as a very mean description. It was. So what was going on behind that description?
Well, I think for Robert Herr and the prosecutors, they were legitimately... flabbergasted by how President Biden appeared in that deposition in the interview in October 2023. They were stunned. And I think they legitimately debated how he would appear to a jury. I think they legitimately thought if there's even one person that sees him the way that we see him, which is addled,
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Was there a cover‑up of President Biden’s decline and why does it matter?
0:31–2:40
2
What does Jake Tapper’s book “Original Sin” reveal about Biden’s health and the decision to run again?
2:40–11:04
3
How did the White House staff try to hide Biden’s cognitive lapses – teleprompters, limited meetings, and staged appearances?
11:04–15:12
4
What happened during the June 2024 debate that made the cover‑up look obvious?
15:12–21:01
5
Why did Democratic leaders keep Biden on the ticket despite internal doubts?
21:01–27:01
6
How did groupthink and loyalty to the party shape the narrative around Biden’s fitness?
27:01–38:08
7
What lessons can be drawn about party structures, primary processes, and open conventions?
38:08–48:07
8
What concrete reforms do the hosts suggest to prevent future presidential cover‑ups?
48:07–1:20:04