The 2024 election is squarely in the rear-view mirror and fascism is right at our doorstep, but nevertheless, reporters Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have a new book coming out later this month that dives nose-first right back into all the drama and intrigue of last year. On Tuesday, Tapper and Thompson published a first excerpt of the book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, in the New Yorker.
The excerpt doesn’t reveal anything especially new—we all already knew, for instance, that Biden experienced serious cognitive decline throughout his presidency, culminating in that historically disastrous debate performance on June 27, 2024. We all knew that top Biden aides and Democratic Party officials and operatives worked extensively to try to hide Biden’s cognitive decline, perhaps for years. And we all know that, ultimately, this became impossible to hide. Eventually, the walls closed in on Biden as top party leaders like Adam Schiff, now a U.S. senator representing California and Nancy Pelosi’s long-time apprentice, and of course, George freaking Clooney, called on Biden to step down from the presidential ticket.
But the excerpt from Tapper and Thompson’s book does include some new, worthwhile bits, like the details of a disastrous June 13 fundraiser that convinced Clooney and others that there was no way Biden could run, as well as some pretty no-holds-barred quotes from top Democratic Party operatives and Kamala Harris campaign leadership.
“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, an Obama alum who helped run Harris’ campaign shortly after Biden dropped off, said, pointing to Biden’s decision to run for reelection at all, and his three-week delay after the debate before dropping out. “It’s all Biden… He totally fucked us,” Plouffe continued, squarely blaming Biden for the massive, built-in barriers Harris faced over the course of her 107-day campaign—all amid record levels of public distrust of the Biden-Harris administration thanks to Biden.
Tapper and Thompson also quote an unnamed “prominent Democratic strategist who publicly defended Biden,” which I frankly have to side-eye. To have “publicly defended” Biden while knowing the condition he was in makes this individual as culpable as Biden himself, I’d argue. Nevertheless, this Democratic strategist said of Biden, “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic Party. He stole it from the American people.”
Now, for that disastrous June 13 fundraiser in Los Angeles, which assembled former President Obama, Jimmy Kimmel, and Biden, who went straight to the fundraiser after about 10 consecutive days of travel between the U.S. and the G-7 conference in Europe. “The President appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him, in December, 2022. He was taking tiny steps, and an aide seemed to be guiding him by the arm,” Tapper and Thompson write. They quote an unnamed Hollywood VIP who told them, “It was like watching someone who was not alive. It was startling. And we all looked at each other. It was so awful.” But the low point of Biden’s evening came when the president didn’t recognize Clooney, his friend of roughly two decades who had organized the fundraiser at significant cost and inconvenience to himself. Biden’s aide needed to tell him who Clooney was not once but twice. “It was not O.K.,” a witness said of the incident. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know—especially a famous person who’s doing a fucking fund-raiser for you—it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.”
Fundraiser attendees recounted to Tapper and Thompson how Obama largely had to work damage control throughout the evening:
“Obama didn’t know what to make of how his former running mate was acting. At one point, in a small group of a few dozen top donors, Biden began speaking—barely audibly—and trailed off incoherently. Obama had to jump in and preside. At other moments, during photos, Obama would hop in and finish sentences for him.”
Other attendees described Biden’s condition as “terrifying,” saying Biden was “almost catatonic.”
Then came what I, personally, found to be the most surprising tidbit of the excerpt, which is that Clooney wrote his now-famous July 10 op-ed calling for Biden to drop out by himself, sans a ghost writer, from his home office in his house in the South of France. Hats off to him for that. I kind of just assume every famous person who writes anything uses ghost writers.
Shortly before Clooney’s op-ed, “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,” printed in the New York Times, Biden aides and Democratic Party leadership attempted to dissuade Clooney from moving forward; one of Biden’s closest advisers, Steve Ricchetti, reportedly threatened Clooney like a “Mob boss,” as some of Ricchetti’s colleagues put it to Tapper and Thompson. At this, I almost have to laugh—how do you cancel George Clooney? And all for pointing out that maybe the party shouldn’t run someone who will obviously lose to Trump?
And yet, that’s not how Biden seems to have seen any of it, perhaps even to this day. “President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The elites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump,” Tapper and Thompson write. “That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again. His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.”
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