Opinion | All the President's Enablers

The first time I realized that Joe Biden might not be playing with a full deck was in 2014 when he addressed an LGBTQ+ rights group. Explaining his 2012 epiphany in support of same-sex marriage, the then-vice president recalled an incident when his father drove him into Wilmington, Delaware for a job interview. “We stopped at a red light,” Biden said. “I looked over to my left, and there were two men kissing good-bye, and I looked, and it was the first time I’d seen that. And my father looked at me and said, ‘They love each other.’” In retelling this anecdote, Biden pinpointed the year as 1961.

One doesn’t need to be an historian of the gay American experience (like me) to suspect that this story was, as Biden himself might say, “malarkey.” In 1961, homosexuality was illegal in every state of the union (Delaware would not decriminalize it until 1973), diagnosed as a mental illness and categorized as a national security threat. The chance that a young Joe Biden randomly encountered two “well-dressed” men kissing in broad daylight in downtown Wilmington on their way to work in 1961 is close to zero.

This impression of Biden’s diminishing mental acuity was compounded by the fact that he had simultaneously recited a significantly different version of the story. In an interview with the New York Times published just three weeks before his speech, Biden said it was one of his sons who had seen the men kissing and that it was he who nonchalantly said, “They love each other.” Despite this version being more plausible, it was the implausible one involving his father that Biden would repeat on multiple occasions.

Episodes like this, which occurred years before Biden decided to run for president in 2020, are important to remember in light of the historical revisionism that the former president’s partisans and their media sycophants have been promoting since the disastrous debate performance that drove him from the 2024 election campaign. In this alternate universe, Biden was a sharp and capable commander-in-chief at worst prone to logorrhea. Those who suggested otherwise were “ageist” enemies of democracy promoting deceptively edited “cheap fake” videos of Biden to aid and abet Donald Trump. For these diehards, still sticking to their guns in the manner of Japanese holdouts discovered on uninhabited islands decades after the Second World War, Biden’s parley with Trump was not a catastrophe the likes of which had not been seen since the advent of televised presidential debates, but merely a “bad night.”

The former president’s deterioration and the effort to hide it from the public feature prominently in three recent tomes about the 2024 campaign: Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by the veteran campaign book-writing duo Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes; Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple; and, most sensationally, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, It’s Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. The first two focus more squarely on Biden’s ill-fated reelection campaign, while the third, which publishes this week, zeroes in on the cover-up itself. While each book has its individual strengths, revelations and insights, reading them together paints a powerful picture of a presidency in dangerous denial. The impression that the president’s true condition was being kept under wraps was only heighted by the news last weekend that Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, an illness that usually takes years to progress.

Of course, well into the second Trump administration, readers have every right to also question the timing of these books, published long after their revelations could have made a difference to recent history. But better late than never.

The “Original Sin” of Tapper and Thompson’s title refers to Biden’s decision to seek reelection, a choice that surprised many Democrats when his aides started confirming it not long after he was elected in 2020. In December 2019, while Biden was vying for his party’s presidential nomination and four months before he vaguely promised to be a “bridge” to a new “generation of leaders,” four Biden advisers told POLITICO that it was virtually inconceivable he would run for reelection in 2024. Biden’s decline was apparent to his inner circle before the 2020 Democratic Convention, in which, given the pandemic, his participation would consist mostly of pre-taped videos. Even this undemanding medium proved onerous for the then 77-year-old, whose performance speaking virtually with real Americans was, according to two aides, “horrible” as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” Despite being edited by some of the best people in the business, little of the material was usable.

The morbid observation by some Biden aides that the pandemic, while terrible for the world, was an enormous boon for their campaign, was entirely accurate. With Biden granted a plausible excuse to avoid active campaigning, the American people were shielded from the physical and mental regression that would become increasingly apparent as the country opened up. And once he entered the White House, it was visible to anyone who saw him up close. “The cabinet meetings were terrible and at times uncomfortable — and they were from the beginning,” a cabinet secretary told Tapper and Thompson, one of four to speak anonymously with the authors. In October 2021, when Biden addressed the Democratic House caucus in an effort to win their support for an infrastructure package, one member described his 30-minute speech as “incomprehensible.” According to Allen and Parnes, Vice President Kamala Harris’ communications director eventually drew up a spreadsheet listing judges across the country who could administer her the oath of office in the event Biden died.

According to all three accounts, 2023 was the year Biden’s deterioration became undeniable. It was also the year he formally announced his decision to seek reelection, which brought his worrisome condition increasingly into the open. A television ad in which Biden would answer pre-screened questions from a handpicked audience had to be scrapped because none of the footage was usable. At small, intimate events with donors, Biden would avail himself of teleprompters, stop randomly in the middle of his speech and shake hands, and just as randomly start speaking again. That June, following an interview on MSNBC, Biden got up from the desk and wandered off the set as the cameras rolled. The following month at a White House picnic, Biden didn’t recognize Congressman Eric Swalwell, one of his opponents for the nomination. (To be fair to Biden, not recognizing Eric Swalwell is a point in his favor.)

Befitting an inner circle dubbed the “Politburo,” the Biden ascendancy in many ways resembled the Soviet Union in the early 1980s when three successive geriatric leaders died within as many years. The pathetic sight of Barack Obama fetching a spaced out Biden from the edge of the stage at a Hollywood fundraiser and leading him off into the wings recalls the videotaped spectacle of an enfeebled Konstantin Chernenko “voting” in a hospital room shoddily refashioned as a polling place. In one of the more disturbing revelations from Original Sin, White House residence aides were told that they no longer needed to staff the elevator and could leave work early because the proletarian Bidens didn’t like being waited on. The real motive, the authors suggest, was to expand a privacy buffer around the president and limit his exposure to household staff — the kind of move one can imagine in the palace of an aging dictator.

By August, 77 percent of Americans, including 69 percent of Democrats, said Biden was too old to seek reelection, numbers that Biden and his aides would have heeded had they truly cared about protecting American democracy from the threat of Donald Trump. Further validation of the public’s worries arrived the following February, when Robert Hur, the special counsel assigned to investigate Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, released his report. Though Hur, following a five hour-long deposition, found that Biden had “willfully” retained such documents, he did not recommend prosecution because the president would come across to a jury “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Tapper and Thompson reprint just a few of the over 250 pages of interview transcripts that led Hur to this conclusion. Throughout, Biden rambles aimlessly about the history of various pieces of furniture in his Delaware beach house, the Mongol invasion of Europe, pictures of his wife Jill in a bathing suit, and much else having absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand. As if to confirm Hur’s conclusion, Biden, in a testy press conference responding to the report, confused the presidents of Mexico and Egypt. Despite Biden exposing himself as a real-life Mr. Magoo, Democratic partisans rushed to his defense and smeared the special counsel. Former Attorney General Eric Holder vilified Hur, by all accounts a politically impartial public servant, as “extremely naïve or a partisan.” Then-congressman Adam Schiff, even more attention-hungry than usual given that he was running for Senate, confronted Hur at a hearing and accused him of intending to “ignite a political firestorm” with his entirely accurate description of the president’s fading memory.

Though anyone paying a modicum of attention to the Biden presidency should have seen that its titular figure was undergoing a precipitous cognitive and physical decline, what made the debate of June 27, 2024 so significant was that it provided indisputable evidence. Biden glaring off into the distance, mouth agape, looking as if he didn’t even know where he was — it was the one time during the campaign when I actually felt sorry for him, even if it was a tragedy of his own making. After deceiving the country and the world about his health for years on end — effectively perpetrating a fraud on the American people — it’s sadly inevitable that that many are now questioning the timing of the revelation of his prostate cancer diagnosis.

Biden had enablers, of course, none more culpable than his wife Jill, whose performance at the post-debate party was downright creepy. “Joe, you did such a great job!” she enthused in the manner of a mother trying to cheer up her child who struck out at t-ball. “You answered every question! You know all the facts!” (One feels slightly more respect for Jill learning that she has since expressed private regret for this performance). Somehow, Biden’s own remarks were even more cringe-inducing. Citing “a famous movie by John Wayne,” he referred to Trump and his minions as “nothing but lying, dog-faced pony soldiers.” It’s a line Biden had cited before, and it would rank as one of the Duke’s most memorable had he uttered it, which, of course, he never did. An agonizing three weeks later, Biden relented to the overwhelming pressure from within his party and dropped out of the race.

How did a man so evidently unfit for the presidency come so close to securing renomination?

Hubris, predicated upon a series of contingencies and counterfactuals. Biden’s decision not to challenge Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic nomination, her subsequent loss to Donald Trump, and his victory over Trump four years later, gave Biden and his circle a feeling of political infallibility. Add yet another counterfactual — the possibility that Biden might have remained in the race and somehow beat Trump — and you have a situation where the people who got us into this mess can persist in claiming they were right.

The excuses the Biden team served to inquiring reporters and concerned Democrats were transparent nonsense. “He’s just not a great communicator,” a senior White House official told Tapper and Thompson, bringing to mind the late Christopher Hitchens’ moniker for Amtrak Joe, “the Great Commuter.” (Alas, one who “never sits in the quiet car.”) Speaking of the Gipper, longtime Biden adviser Mike Donilon defended his boss by pointing out that the 40th president also once had a bad debate. Indeed, Ronald Reagan became a go-to punching bag for Democrats defensive of Biden’s age, his supposedly undiagnosed Alzheimer’s largely responsible for the Iran-Contra scandal. A quick look at Reagan’s vigorous final press conference dispels such illusions.

The most important service these post-mortem volumes provide is naming the people who gaslit the country. Chief among the malefactors is Donilon, informal leader of “the Politburo” and a figure who blends the ethics of Bob Haldeman with the avarice of Bob Menendez. In 2022, explaining the rationale for a second Biden term, Donilon revealed the altruism that directed him towards a life of public service: “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” For his selfless contribution to safeguarding democracy, Donilon demanded an astonishing $4 million fee, a figure difficult to square with his party’s ostensible commitment to gender equity considering that Jennifer O’Malley Dillion, the actual campaign manager, had a $300,000 salary. Most astoundingly, Tapper and Thompson reveal that Donilon was the only person who shared polling data with Biden, thus earning him a place in history alongside the advisers who told the last Shah of Iran that he remained popular with his people. To this day Donilon is deluded as ever, recently treating Harvard undergraduates to a bizarre rant in which he declared that it was the Democratic leadership which had in fact “lost its mind.”

Next is Steve Richetti, one of Biden’s White House counselors whose main function appears to have been obsessively watching Morning Joe every day and regaling White House staff with all the nice things that the Democratic Party mouthpieces who host it said about the terrific jobs they were doing. Following a White House meeting with Democratic Governors a week after the debate, a concerned Maura Healey of Massachusetts told Richetti about the troubling exchange she had just had with the commander-in-chief in which he cited polls showing him beating Trump. Healey was unaware of such polls because they didn’t exist. “I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” Richetti retorted. “I know polls.” Two weeks later, after a meeting with a group of pollsters bearing bad news, Richetti angrily called one of them and snapped, “You’re supposed to tell us how to win, not that we can’t.”

One almost feels sorry for Ron Klain, Biden’s first chief of staff. To have one of the most insecure men in American politics declare that “only one person here is smarter than me and it’s Ron” suggests how Klain could have become so servile towards his boss. When former Obama adviser David Axelrod told the New York Times that Biden “would be closer to 90 than 80 at the end of a second term,” Klain chewed his ear off. The following year, when talent agent extraordinaire Ari Emanuel expressed similar worries while subjecting Klain to one of his world-famous tirades at the Aspen Institute, Klain, according to Allen and Parnes, “brushed the concern aside.” Even though, as Klain later told Whipple, he feared the debate would be a “nationally televised disaster,” three weeks after said disaster he was telling Biden to stay in the race.

The hubris of Anita Dunn, “the grand dame of Beltway public relations” in the words of Allen and Parnes, derived from her belief that she was the reason Biden won his decisive victory in the 2020 South Carolina Democratic primary. Though Congressman Jim Clyburn deserved the credit, Dunn and O’Malley Dillon “were touted as geniuses,” according to Whipple. Believing her own press, Dunn vastly overestimated her abilities, lecturing a Biden pollster in early 2023 that “we don’t need polling. The decision has been made. He’s running.” Following the debate, she told Whipple that Biden “had actually won…with people who mattered,” a constituency that apparently excluded the vast majority of the voting public. Alas, not even this level of purblind loyalty was sufficient to maintain Biden’s trust. Dunn’s one saving grace — her insistence that Biden’s prodigal son Hunter be kept as far away from the campaign as possible — alienated the First Son, who turned his father against her.

Hunter’s antics and shady business dealings were more than just a tabloid sideshow, Tapper and Thompson write, because the drama surrounding him symbolized “a family dynamic built around rejection of reality.” In a revealing display of grandiosity, Hunter told his family that if Donald Trump was able to strike back at his critics, so should he. Hunter was the leading advocate for the novel theory that it was not Biden who blundered the debate but rather his advisers who left him ill-prepared. Family dynamics comprise a significant part of this Shakespearean tragedy. When Joe was vice president, he went to great lengths hiding the extent of older son Beau’s illness, foreshadowing the later concealment of his own decline. And it wasn’t just the Bidens who treated the presidency as a family business. Donilon’s niece served on the National Security Council, Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reed’s daughter was Biden’s day scheduler, and all four of Richetti’s children had administration jobs.

If there was anyone within the Biden brood who had the influence, never mind the responsibility, to stop the impending disaster that was the 2024 reelection campaign, it was Jill, or “Dr.” Jill as she insisted on being called. (“Lady McBiden,” as Alexandra Pelosi referred to her, is more fitting.) Alas, Jill was even “more firm than her husband about maintaining a residence at Pennsylvania Avenue,” according to Allen and Parnes. Anthony Bernal, who exerted more power than perhaps any other chief of staff to a first lady, was the natural extension of his boss, with his incessant talk about “the second term,” his planning Jill’s 2025 travel schedule, and his pronouncements that “You don’t run for four years — you run for eight.”

Rounding out this rogues’ gallery are senior communications staffers TJ Ducklo and Andrew Bates, who behaved like the mooks in a third-rate mob movie. Ducklo, fired early in the administration for threatening to “destroy” a female reporter and who clearly saw himself as the muscle of this witless duo, was brought back for the re-elect mainly to bully Democrats into attacking journalists who reported on Biden’s age. Bates, meanwhile, reached Baghdad Bob-level comedic heights during the final months of the campaign with his ludicrous attestations to Biden’s fearsome mental and physical stamina. My personal favorite, issued on X during a NATO press conference in which Biden introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin” and confused his own vice president with Trump, was, “To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that fucking good.” Presented with these characters, one can’t help but feel pity for the luckless Karine Jean-Pierre, who as the public face of the Biden White House had the unenviable job of defending its numbskull denizens on a daily basis.

Finally, there are the many Democrats who witnessed the president’s senescence yet said nothing. At the top of this list is Schiff, who lambasted Hur on national television for having the temerity to remark upon Biden’s “poor memory.” A few months later, after Biden confirmed Hur’s assessment on the CNN debate stage, Schiff went around telling colleagues that Biden needed to drop out. When Schiff finally mustered the fortitude to say this out loud, this profile in courage became the 23rd member of Congress to do so. A public apology to Hur has not been forthcoming.

Revealingly, none of these books are interested in the essential role that the media played in the cover-up. Given how much the press valorizes itself for defending democracy, its dereliction of duty regarding Biden’s infirmities is a massive failure. To be sure, the Biden White House didn’t make things easy for reporters; it’s no coincidence that the two journalists granted the most access to Biden — Evan Osnos of the New Yorker and Franklin Foer of the Atlantic — overlooked the biggest story of his presidency. But lack of access is no excuse. When POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger produced a deeply reported, unvarnished book about the Biden family’s half-century rise to power in 2021, the mainstream media ignored it. With the exception of Thompson, one of the handful of journalists who consistently reported on Biden’s fitness and who bears the scars of vicious White House attacks on his character to prove it, most of the media declined to investigate Biden’s disposition because it interfered with a higher priority: saving the country from Donald Trump.

The individuals who collaborated in the cover-up of Joe Biden's condition deserve to be shunned. While many contributed to the disaster that was the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination process, ultimate responsibility rests with Biden himself. Like Bill Clinton, who made his family, friends, and advisers lie for him over a personal matter, Joe Biden obliged his supporters to engage in deception on his behalf. While Clinton clearly understood what he was doing, however, we can’t say the same about Biden. Cocooned by mendacious aides and grasping family members, his cognitive functions degenerating rapidly, the perception of Biden as a vulnerable senior citizen manipulated by others is unnervingly realistic. But while Clinton’s duplicity concerned the minutiae of sex, Biden’s affected the fate of the world. The lie that he, his family, and his underlings foisted on the American public was severe as any Donald Trump has ever told.