After reading Original Sin, I’m even more irritated at Joe Biden

It took me a while to finish reading the tell-all book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, It's Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again.

One reason is that the book brought back painful memories of the 2024 presidential election that resulted with Donald Trump beating Kamala Harris and earning another four years in the White House where he will have another opportunity to lead our country and the world down some dangerous paths.

Sending the military into Democratic-leaning cities. Weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies. Trashing renewable energy and efforts to combat global warming. Deporting millions of hard-working undocumented migrants. Doing away with scientific and medical research. Taking health care away from many millions of Americans. Raising prices through poorly thought-out tariffs.

While all of these problems, and many more, can be laid at the feet of Trump, it is impossible to read Tapper's and Thompson's book and not think, "If Joe Biden had acted for the good of the country rather than his own ego, there's a good chance Trump wouldn't have won the election."

So Biden deserves a good share of the blame for Trump's victory and everything bad that has followed in the wake of Harris's narrow but clear defeat. Biden should never have run for a second term. If he had announced this midway through his presidency, the Democratic Party would have had time to prepare for a contested primary in 2024 that would have resulted in the strongest possible candidate to run against Trump.

But Biden was surrounded by true believers who covered up his mental and physical deficiencies until Biden's disastrous debate performance against Trump made it clear that he wasn't capable of serving as president for another four years, since he was incapable of carrying out his duties now.

On my Church of the Churchless blog I shared some quotations from the first part of the book. These set the tone for the rest of the book, which describes in excruciating detail how the cover-up occurred. If you wonder why the book was called Original Sin, it is because Biden and his backers had an almost religious faith in Biden's abilities even when that faith needed to be called into question.

The lessons from this book go beyond one man and one political party. They speak to more universal questions about cognitive dissonance, groupthink, courage, cowardice, and patriotism. 

George Orwell once wrote that "we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

He was writing about World War II, but he could have been writing about any time, any era. "The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye," Orwell went on. "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

Here is what was in front of our noses.

…The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden's decision to run for reelection — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.

…To grasp how Joe Biden could have decided to run for reelection at his historically advanced age, one must understand Biden's own mythology. Even before one gets to his belief that he, and only he, was capable of defeating Donald Trump, consider the legend of Joe Biden and its grounding in exceeding expectations, defying odds, and surviving.

"Get up!" he wrote in his first memoir, Promises to Keep. "To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the feet of any wise man. Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down."

…So to think that aging or ailment would make Biden reconsider his run is to not understand Joe Biden and the true believers with whom he surrounded himself. Fate had spent the better part of the last half century throwing everything it could at him, the worst tragedies imaginable. 

And every goddamn time, he got up. Every. Goddamn. Time.

To family and close aides, the mythology became almost a theology, a near-religious faith in Biden's ability to rise again. And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.

…The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving "my word as a Biden," but they had another, more private saying: "Never call a fat person fat." It wasn't just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts.

"Don't say mean truths" is how someone close to the family put it.

"The Bidens' greatest strength is living in their own reality," this person told us. "And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn't going to die. Hunter's sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the narrative and repeat it."

From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to admit that Biden was declining.

There were some aides who appreciated the president but did not share their colleague's religious zeal. The Bidens' closest aides, they told us, essentially hid his deterioration from the public and from others in the administration.

…The significance of Bernal and Tomasini is the degree to which their rise in the Biden White House signaled the success of people whose allegiance was to the Biden family — not to the presidency, not to the American people, not to the country, but to the Biden theology. They were the Bidens' eyes and ears, the keepers of the flame, the protectors of the myth. That included casting out potential heretics. Bernal, in particular, took on this role.

…During one of the low points of Biden's campaign, Axelrod attended a New Hampshire town hall. Biden's remarks were not particularly stirring, but a line of voters formed afterward. Each one wanted to talk to him, most with sad stories, seeking a kind ear. And Biden stood and greeted every single one of them

Like the pilgrimages to Lourdes, Axelrod later said.

…Other Democrats knew that the White House watched closely for any signs of dissent. They kept quiet and went along.