The Great Biden Book War has finally begun

Everyone saw the Great Biden Book War coming. It loomed the moment Joe Biden left the presidential race last year. When Vice President Kamala Harris lost the popular vote to a resurgent Donald Trump, the storm became unavoidable. Now it’s here. Reporters, former aides, and opportunistic authors are scrambling to soothe their consciences, pad their wallets, and secure their place in the historical record. Even the Biden family has taken notice — hence last week’s cringeworthy media tour. Washington can’t stop talking about it.

The first major book on President Biden’s cognitive decline since his abrupt withdrawal comes from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson. “Original Sin,” based on more than 200 interviews with senior Democrats inside and around the White House and Harris’ campaign, delivers a damning account of Biden’s mental deterioration — and the elaborate cover-up engineered by both his staff and his family.

This isn’t the first time hyper-partisan media have struggled with a reckoning of their own cover-ups and obfuscations after they were quickly proven fools.

Some gems published in Axios thus far include that the White House was preparing to use a wheelchair if Biden won a second term (and put it off because of the campaign). Britain’s left-wing nonprofit Guardian website notes:

Since at least 2022 Biden has been increasingly prone to lose his train of thought and struggle to remember the names of top aides. His speeches can be incoherent and difficult to hear. When he proved incapable of delivering a two-minute video address without stumbling, aides filmed him with two cameras so the edit would be less obvious.

Weren’t Biden’s speeches, his constant struggles to remember names of people, places, and countries — and his tendency to refer to conversations with long-dead public figures — already out in the open?

The authors — both fixtures of corporate media — admit to bearing “some responsibility” for years of willful silence and misleading spin. But they devote little ink to their own complicity. Before the disastrous Biden-Trump debate, Thompson reported on behind-the-scenes campaign dynamics without once confronting Biden’s mental decline.

The book also skips over Tapper’s 2020 performance, when he berated GOP surrogate Lara Trump for raising concerns about Biden’s obvious deterioration. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they hear you make a comment like that?” he demanded.

When she fired back with what “is very clearly a cognitive decline,” he cut her off. “I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose someone's cognitive decline,” he chastised her. “I would think someone in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing people from afar,” he added, referring to CNN's constant coverage of Trump's mental state. Amazing stuff!

It’s amazing because anyone who followed Biden on the 2020 campaign trail — and remembered him at his peak just a few years earlier — could see and hear the difference. His decline didn’t happen overnight. Some aging relatives fade slowly, others more quickly, but pretending Biden’s deterioration was sudden and invisible amounts to a willful denial of reality.

Tapper and Thompson aren’t the only ones struggling to justify their silence. During his damage-control appearance on “The View” last week, Biden rambled for nearly a minute before punting the question to his wife. Jill Biden jumped in with a few party-line deflections, prompting cheers from the studio crowd while the president stood awkwardly beside her, like an animatronic figure running low on power.

This isn’t the first time hyper-partisan media have struggled with a reckoning of their own cover-ups and obfuscations after they were quickly proven fools. After years of running interference for Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos confessed in his 1999 memoir “All Too Human”: “I didn’t want our enemies to win. They’d stop at nothing to defeat him, so nothing would stop me from defending him. Now I was a true true believer.”

Stephanopoulos’ 2024 campaign reporting notedly never questioned Biden’s very clear problems until after the Trump debate. Old habits die hard.

It’s too late for the press. It’s too late for the former president, too, despite Jill Biden’s ignoble efforts to save him. The New York Times accidentally (and ironically) nailed the issue in its review, which opens with a laughably incorrect explanation of the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin as a “biblical story ... about the danger of innocent curiosity,” contrasting Eve’s apparent innocence with the guilt of the Biden White House.

“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye,” Christ asked in the Gospel of Matthew, “but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?”

And it’s all just beginning, too. This is the first book salvo, and there is always return fire when one person starts spilling the goods on a failure of this proportion. Expect more to try to cash in, just as those they blame hit back. The Bidens may be over, but the Biden Book War has only just begun.

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