Reporters Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper claimed their book proves the Biden administration worked to “increasingly” shield the public from former President Joe Biden’s mental decline.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again was released Tuesday. CBS Mornings hosted the pair for their first television interview since it was revealed Biden has an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer. Former White House staff have vehemently denied that they witnessed any health concerns for Biden, but Tapper suggested even some government officials were shielded from seeing Biden for an extended period.
“I think the main people complicit in hiding the nonfunctioning Biden were President Biden, first lady Biden, Hunter Biden, and then his immediate circle of aides that other people in the White House called the politburo,” Tapper said. “They were the ones who saw President Biden every day up close and personal.
The authors interviewed “200 White House insiders” for the book. They claimed the former staffers became much more transparent since former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential race. Thompson detailed how the strategy to shield Biden progressed over time.
“I think some of the early steps were done with innocent enough reasons. You want your principal to look good. But as his diminishment increased, some of those actions became increasingly deceitful,” Thompson said. “The fact is, Biden, we saw on [the] debate stage last June, he had other moments like that behind the scenes and increasingly so. They started structuring his public schedule to make sure the public didn’t see it, and even some people inside their own administration, their own White House, their own Cabinet did not see this. They shielded him.”
Tapper was notably the moderator for that June presidential debate between Biden and President Donald Trump, in which Biden performed poorly. Thompson and Tapper wrote that the debate “was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose faculties had been diminishing for years.”
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The CNN anchor couldn’t say “whether they were lying to themselves and everybody else or just everybody else” in covering up Biden’s mental decline.
Thompson won the Aldo Beckman Award for his coverage of former President Joe Biden‘s mental decline during his time in office. The Axios reporter originally had a contract with Simon & Schuster to release the book last year, but the publisher withdrew. Following Thompson’s public plea to find a new publisher and release the book in 2025, Penguin Press took on the project.
