The Crimes of the Politburo
A historian’s perspective on “Original Sin.”
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Even Armando Iannucci, creator of Veep, would have struggled to make this stuff up. On the night of the now-infamous presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on June 27, 2024, Michael Smith, interior designer to the stars, and his partner, former Obama-era ambassador James Costos, hosted an LA watch party for their Hollywood chums. Director Rob Reiner was there. So was Jane Fonda (of course she was). But in a curious twist, three of the favorites for the 2028 presidential race—Governors Pritzker of Illinois, Whitmer of Michigan, and Beshear of Kentucky—were also present, as was the Second Gentleman of the United States, Doug Emhoff.
As Biden’s slow-motion car crash performance played out on giant TVs throughout the house, the luvvies started to panic. Fonda was distraught. Reiner got angry. And if he couldn’t throw Momala from the train, then Doug would have to do. Apparently looking right at him, the director started yelling, “We’re going to lose our fucking democracy because of you!”
That’s just one of the laugh-out-loud, these-people-are-clowns moments in Original Sin, the fantastic new book by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson about President Biden’s decision to run again in 2024. They stick hard and fast to one theme—Biden’s decline and its cover-up—rather than trying to cover the entire Biden administration and election campaign, so the narrative argument is unrelenting and utterly persuasive about the disastrous “attempt to put an at-times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”
For historians, the book is destined to stand alongside classics like Theodore White’s The Making of the President 1960 and even Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s All the President’s Men as one of the great books about American electoral politics. The conclusion to Original Sin references the scandal that Woodward and Bernstein did so much to unearth. “Joe Biden is not Richard Nixon,” Tapper and Thompson say, “and the hiding and cover-up of his deterioration is not Watergate.”
Indeed it’s not. In fact, it’s worse. Watergate was at its heart a scandal about dirty tricks, with collective political opinion concluding that Richard Nixon had engaged in conduct unbecoming of a President of the United States. But while Nixon may have lost his moral compass, he hadn’t lost his mind. No doctor, let alone a casual observer, can diagnose President Biden’s cognitive state from a distance. But Tapper and Thompson show us what was in front of our faces—that for much of the time, sadly, Biden wasn't competent enough to do the job.
The book has a number of implications, not least of which is that the next time a Democrat says to you that Donald Trump represents “an existential threat to democracy,” give them your copy of Original Sin. For sure, other factors were at play. Venality, loyalty to Biden, overconfidence and inertia, the herd mentality—all feature in this story. So too does Biden’s obvious “buyer’s remorse” about the choice of Kamala Harris as vice president. But if claims of democracy itself being in peril were anything other than rhetorical, the party would not—could not—seriously have proposed putting forward as Trump’s opponent in 2024 a man who oftentimes could barely seem to move or talk.
For example, at the D-Day commemorations in Normandy in June 2024, many of the veterans, some nearing a hundred years old, appeared more sprightly and alert than President Biden. In one excruciating moment, Biden got caught between standing and sitting on the dais, apparently unable to move either up or down. The contrast with President Reagan at commemorations in 1984 or President Clinton in 1994—stand-out moments in their presidencies—could not have been starker. The idea that Biden might serve a further four years as president was preposterous.
Public gaffes piled up. Biden referred to Vice President Harris as “Vice President Trump” and described himself as the first black vice president. At a NATO summit President Zelensky of Ukraine was called “President Putin.” Behind the scenes at photo ops Biden would regularly fail to recognize long-time friends and colleagues. Even George Clooney, not a man used to being ignored, went unrecognized at a Hollywood fundraiser that he himself had organized. At campaign events Biden would repeat stories or simply allow them to peeter out into an embarrassed silence. He would lose his way coming off stage. His voice, hoarse at the best of times, would often become an inaudible whisper.
Meanwhile the decision-making process in the Oval Office became more and more opaque. “The thing is, he’s an old man,” said one cabinet secretary interviewed for the book. “His guard was down [and] I think people around him had their own agenda.”
But anyone who said so at the time found themselves subject to the full force of the White House operation, led by the “Politburo” of advisers like Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Anita Dunn. Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips—the heroic figure who destroyed his career trying to engineer a challenge to Biden—was traduced, belittled, and cast out. So too was Robert Hur, the special prosecutor who called Biden an “elderly man with a poor memory.” Merrick Garland, the attorney general who had employed Hur, was told he could not expect to keep his job in a second term. Even Democratic Party legends like David Axelrod—guru to Barack Obama—were slammed for suggesting that Biden should step aside.
Sometimes it feels like Iannucci’s film The Death of Stalin—when Politburo rivals plot and scheme like Keystone Cops following the Soviet leader’s stroke—rather than Veep might be a more accurate analogy.
The media could have done a better job too. Most followed the line that attacks on Biden were right-wing slurs, with only the likes of David Ignatius at The Washington Post, HBO’s Bill Maher, Annie Linskey at The Wall Street Journal, and Ezra Klein at The New York Times proving honorable exceptions. They, of course, were denounced as Republican stooges. Forthwith, perhaps every political correspondent should recite as their daily catechism the legendary advice of the postwar English reporter Louis Heren about interviewing politicians: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”
If Democrats self-evidently did not regard Trump as an existential threat to the Republic—how could they and then act as they did?—the more pertinent question is whether Biden himself represented that threat. He worked mostly in the middle of the day, took few meetings, regularly forgot facts and faces, and often seemed befuddled and unable to finish sentences. A different cabinet secretary interviewed for the book told of being denied access to the president for months in 2024. At a rare meeting, this secretary was shocked at how “disoriented” and “out of it” Biden appeared.
Of course, there were moments of lucidity and clear decision-making. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, one of the few able to insist on seeing Biden regularly for questions of foreign policy and national security, said he “continually witnessed the president fully able to meet the moment.” But no one could read Original Sin and believe Biden was always in control. Another cabinet member spoke of him being able to work only a few hours a day. A crisis at 3pm would have been fine; the hypothetical 3am emergency, not so much.
So forget four more years. The real question is how Biden was allowed to remain in office, holding the “nuclear football,” for the last year of his presidency when he was so clearly unable to discharge his duties. That the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was not invoked seems astonishing at this distance. Not since Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a major stroke in late 1919 and remained in office until early 1921, has an incumbent president been so demonstrably unfit for office. Chillingly, one adviser spoke of getting Biden reelected and then letting unelected officials “pick up the slack” from there. “He could disappear for four years,” the aide said, “and he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”
What this all speaks to is the entitlement of a political operation that believed the norms and ethics of government were a yardstick only to be applied to the other side. Nowhere is that arrogance better shown up than in the person of the vice president, Kamala Harris, on the night of the infamous debate itself. When even CNN’s Anderson Cooper, hardly part of the Republican praetorian guard, felt compelled to point out that the Biden of that night “was a very different person” to the one she had debated in the primaries of 2019—“I mean, that’s certainly true, is it not?” he asked, incredulous—Harris was tetchy but kept her temper. Only when the interview ended did she give vent to her fury.
That anger was not directed at Biden, let alone herself, for compromising the Democratic Party and the country. It was instead her dignity that was affronted. “This motherfucker doesn’t treat me like the damn Vice President of the United States,” the authors record her saying of Cooper. “I thought we were better than this.”
Yes, we had rather hoped you were better than this too.
Richard Aldous is the host of Persuasion’s Bookstack podcast and author of books including Schlesinger and Reagan and Thatcher.
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I fully agreed with Aldous' "Farewell to a Mediocre President" piece. I'm also someone who was not excited about Biden running again, who was convinced by Ezra Klein's piece in early 2024 that Biden needed to step aside, and who argued heavily against simply replacing Biden with Harris once he finally did (https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/2024-the-pre-mortem).
Having said all that, I find this article maddeningly and deliberately obtuse, particularly when it suggests that the "Trump is an existential threat to democracy" case is somehow undermined by the Biden candidacy.
First, if you believe that Trump is a threat to democracy and it's critical for him to be defeated, then there certainly was a reasonable case to be made for sticking with Biden. Incumbency comes with great advantages and an open race to be his successor had the potential to create fissures within the Democratic party and undermine its unity.
So while I became convinced earlier than most that it was the wrong decision to continue to stand behind Biden (and then a mistake to transition to Kamala), I was never 100% sure that I was right. One could certainly come to a different conclusion, while still being fully motivated by then belief that a Trump candidacy would be catastrophic to the country. I'm guessing that folks on both sides of the Biden debate would fully agree with my assessment of Trump:
https://gordonstrause.substack.com/p/the-return-of-donald-trump-a-tragedy
Second, when folks like me talk about Trump being a threat to democracy, we're literally talking about the fact that Trump has the potential to put the country into an Orbanesque spiral that could truly mean the end of free and fair elections. That is fundamentally different and scarier than having a President who is debilitated. While it wasn't good for America that the last year of Wilson's Presidency was fundamentally run by his staff, it also wasn't a threat to America's future as a democracy. When someone like Aldous purposefully tries to elide that difference it makes for a very frustrating read.
I don't understand how the Democrats can rail about how Trump is such a danger to democracy, and at the same time expect a demented old man and an inept VP to win another election. Then when the demented old man fumbles the debate, they allow the inept VP to take his place. In spite of Trump being raked over the coals before, during and after his presidency, he still takes the Oval Office because the Democrats fielded such lousy candidates. What did they expect?