Andrew Rawnsley: who’s to blame for the Biden tragedy?

His aides argued that his doddery gait had nothing to do with his fitness to be president and convinced themselves that people were becoming alarmed by what were merely “performative” aspects of the job. They were right that neither physical disability nor evidence of ageing is an impediment to being a competent leader. Franklin D Roosevelt was afflicted by polio and one of America’s greatest presidents.

The real issue with Biden was his mental sharpness. The annual medical examination conducted by Doc O’Connor did not include a cognitive test of the man with the nuclear codes. The authors don’t produce a slam-dunk example of Biden being unable to take a presidential decision; they have assembled a mountain of evidence that his acuity was fading during his final couple of years in office. He would fail to recognise people he had known for years. “You know George,” an aide prodded him at a fundraiser in LA when he couldn’t put a name to the face of its host. “George Clooney,” the aide was forced to clarify. The president would ramble through an anecdote. Minutes later, he would repeat exactly the same yarn. Once a famously garrulous and energetic politician, he would forget words, lose his train of thought, sit with mouth agape. He had trouble taping mundane remarks for short videos “without flubbing lines”. His on-camera bloopers included muddling the leaders of Egypt and Mexico, and referring to Volodomyr Zelenskyy as Vladimir Putin.

Jake Tapper, a CNN anchor and its chief Washington correspondent, co-moderated the fateful 2024 Biden-Trump presidential debate. Alex Thompson is national political correspondent for the website Axios. The authors say they have talked to about 200 lawmakers, officials and other insiders and it is that testimony that powers this angry, accusatory book. It contends that there was a catastrophic and ultimately vain attempt to enable Biden to run for a second term by covering up the extent of his decline. Part of the issue was the president’s self-mythology as the comeback kid who had prevailed over so many personal tragedies and political knockbacks to get to America’s supreme office. He refused to accept that age was the one enemy he couldn’t vanquish. Then there were the senior White House aides in “the Politburo” whose fates were inextricably bound to his and who “let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years”. The efforts to mask his fading condition included limiting his public appearances while using teleprompters and cue cards to get him through even brief remarks. The party’s pollsters were “iced out” so that they couldn’t tell the president how rotten his ratings had become. He was shielded from most of his cabinet – the body didn’t meet for nearly a year – to limit the number of people exposed to his decline. The White House pushed back extremely aggressively against journalists or anyone else who dared raise questions about his fitness to run again. The authors also point the finger at the grandees of the Democrat establishment who had seen things that were shocking but said nothing because they were “so focused on convincing voters that Trump was a true existential threat to the nation that they put blinders on, participating in a charade that delivered the election directly into Trump’s hands”. Many Democratic senators were longtime personal friends and their judgment was also likely skewed by the elderly age profile of many of them.

Truth be told, it was not a terribly effective cover-up. Polling tells us that a chunky majority of the American public had decided – long before most of the progressive elite were prepared to publicly acknowledge this – that Biden wasn’t fit to serve a second term. Voters had come to that conclusion even before he fell apart in a debate with Donald Trump on 27 June 2024, the excruciating event that finally broke the dam of silence. One Democrat senator told colleagues that “there comes a time when you have to tell your dad: ‘It’s time for me to take away the car keys’”. Even then, more than three weeks passed before Biden finally succumbed to pressure to withdraw from the race. That left the Democrats little choice but to shoo-in Kamala Harris as their substitute. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” says David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign. “He totally fucked us.” Another prominent Democratic strategist reckons: “It was an abomination. He stole an election from the Democratic party, he stole it from the American people.”

While the authors lean into this conclusion, I am not entirely convinced. Harris had 107 days to campaign and buckets of money to spend. Longer might have just made her look less attractive to American voters. If Biden had decided to drop out in 2023, maybe a lively round of primaries would have produced a more compelling Democrat candidate. One of the able governors from a swing state in the midwest might have pulled it off. Then again, the mood of anti-incumbency was fierce and the Democrats had other problems. They might have lost whoever they put up.

This is a gripping, haunting account of the Biden tragedy, made even sadder by his cancer diagnosis. But it would be a false consolation for Democrats to simply blame him for their failure to stop Trump.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£25). Order it at observershop.co.uk for a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty