Joe Biden’s doctor had some difficult news.
At the start of an election year that would be gruelling for a candidate half his age, the US president’s stiffened gait was already a clear sign of age-related decline.
But Biden and his inner circle were forced to discuss a worse prognosis.
“Advisers talked about how he may need a wheelchair in a second term,” says Alex Thompson, co-author with Jake Tapper of Original Sin, a book telling the inside story of the ill-fated 2024 Democratic Party presidential campaign.
“He had significant spinal arthritis and his spine was degenerating to the point that, if he either had another bad fall or maybe just because of time, he would have needed to be in a wheelchair.”
In the grand tradition of American presidential medical reports, this was barely hinted at in the description of Biden’s “moderate to severe” arthritis and “mildly decreased range of motion” that was relayed to the public in February 2024.
• The latest political news from the US
The revelation of the “wheelchair debate” is just one of many telling glimpses behind the scenes by Tapper and Thompson into the “insane” attempt to convince America that Biden, then 81, was fit to serve in the White House until he was 86.
Even more outrageous than his true physical state was the failure to carry out any kind of cognitive assessment, given that Biden’s frequent gaffes, memory lapses and odd behaviour were increasingly sounding alarm bells with voters who saw signs of a president well past his prime.
“He passes a cognitive test every day,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, when asked why no formal evaluation was carried out.
This came at a point when Biden was not yet confirmed as the Democratic candidate but was not being opposed by party heavyweights out of deference to his judgment. They had little idea how bad his condition was getting because access to Biden became tightly controlled by a cabal of family members and senior advisers known by senior Democrats as the Politburo, the book claims.
Tapper, 56, a celebrity CNN anchor, and Thompson, 35, a star reporter with the politics website Axios, believe that what may have started out as the usual effort to put the best spin possible on the president’s actions soon became a cover-up. We all know the Shakespearean consequences: the car-crash TV debate performance; the protracted attempt to cling on as the clock ticked; and the parting gift of Kamala Harris, who was unable to stop Donald Trump reclaiming the most powerful political job in the world.
Dozens of senior Democrats, believing they were doing their party and country a service in unifying behind the effort to stop Trump, kept quiet. Until now.
“We knew we were going to find stuff. We didn’t know we were going to find as much as we did,” says Tapper when we meet in a downtown Washington café for an exclusive discussion of the book’s dramatic revelations.
“The degree to which people who weren’t willing to talk to us or be honest with us before the election, and then changed their tune after the election, I found shocking. People that had been saying throughout the election, ‘He’s fine, he’s fine,’ were afterwards much more willing to finally admit the truth.”
Part of Joe Biden’s appeal back in 2020 was his reputation, forged over decades, for being a pretty straight guy. He was chosen by his party to go up against Trump, a self-aggrandising political novice who was far out of his depth during the Covid-19 pandemic. The country opted for the safer pair of hands — not perhaps the greatest orator or thinker, but a reassuring figure after the wild ride of Trump’s presidency. The faith placed in Biden made the disappointment at how things turned out feel to many like a betrayal.
• Joe and Jill Biden interview: I’m not surprised Kamala lost
“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden said in March 2020 as he campaigned for the presidential nomination, at an event with younger Democrats including Harris and the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer — the pair who would end up on his final shortlist for vice-president. It was taken as a sign that he would run a one-term presidency, restore a sense of normality and then hand on the torch. Instead, he announced in April 2023 that he would run again. He became so convinced he was the only person who could stop Trump that he would eventually leave Harris just 107 days to win voters round.
The biblical title, Original Sin, “came from conversations I had with Democrats after the election, when everybody was upset and they were trying to figure out, ‘How on earth did this happen?’ ” Tapper says. “Some would say the original sin was Biden’s decision to run for re-election. We could have called the book A Bad Decision, but it feels much more important than a bad decision; it caused a whole bunch of other problems. It wasn’t just a mistake or a bad decision. It was a human failing.”
David Plouffe, a former adviser to Barack Obama who was drafted in to help run the Harris campaign, was not shy with the authors about his feelings. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” Plouffe told them. Harris was a “great soldier” but the tight timetable was “a nightmare” and the defeat was “all Biden”. Sensitive readers may want to look away now. “He totally f***ed us,” Plouffe said. Hidden from the public gaze, the f-bombs proliferated, but no one could stop the train wreck.
Part of the problem was that Biden’s presidency was extremely hard-won. He saw it as the vindication of a lifetime of never giving in. He had overcome so much: a debilitating childhood stutter; the devastating death of his first wife and baby daughter in a 1972 car crash; two near-fatal aneurysms in 1988; the tragic death of his 46-year-old son, Beau, in 2015 from brain cancer; the humiliating collapse of two presidential runs in 1988 and 2008; and the desperate battle to rehabilitate his drug-addled younger son, Hunter.
• From the archive: Hunter Biden on family tragedies and the drug addiction that nearly destroyed him
This created the personal narrative of a comeback kid who could take any blow, pick himself up and show them all that they were wrong and he was right. “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.”
But showing them all that he could be president — the oldest in US history — fuelled a level of self-belief that to some appeared delusional. It was shared by the Politburo. Chief among them were the long-serving aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti. Donilon, a fellow Irish-American Catholic, had been with Biden since 1981, was his first chief-of-staff when he was VP and oversaw campaigning and messaging, including writing the “fight for the soul of the nation” theme for 2020. Ricchetti, who succeeded Donilon as VP chief-of-staff, had chaired the 2020 campaign. They were heavily invested in Biden’s re-election for their own livelihoods and those of their families: Donilon’s niece had a job with the National Security Council, and Ricchetti’s four children worked in the White House social office, the State Department, the Treasury Department and the Department of Transportation.
One of the book’s most shocking claims is the amount Donilon demanded as payment for working on the re-election campaign: $4 million (some £3 million). For nine months’ work. The authors were told this by two sources and put it to Donilon, who refused to comment. The next highest-paid person was the campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon, who earned $400,000. “There’s a Democratic congressman who says in the book, ‘Guys like Donilon and Ricchetti are living the first line of their obituary.’ Nobody gives that up,” Tapper says. “But I don’t know any senior Democrats who weren’t paid by Joe Biden who thought he had the stamina to be president for four more years.”
Jill Biden’s Office of the First Lady was also all in through her top advisers Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini. “You don’t run for four years — you run for eight,” Bernal would say, bringing up trips or projects for “the second term”, according to the book. When the idea of Harris running came up, the authors say Bernal reacted dismissively, making it plain what he thought. “She can’t win.”
Thompson pinpoints the precise moment he believes the Politburo’s “Biden management” moved into something more sinister. On February 7, 2024, Robert Hur, a special counsel appointed by attorney general Merrick Garland to investigate Biden’s retention of classified documents, announced there would be no charges, saying, “Biden would likely present himself to a jury… as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” It was the first unvarnished assessment of his faculties from an objective outsider. “The White House communications strategy was to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack,” Thompson says. Garland, who had taken Biden at his word that he wanted an independent Department of Justice acting without fear or favour, was “essentially fired”; word went out that he would not be reappointed in a second term.
‘October 2023 is the last cabinet meeting for almost a year’
Harris led the vilification of Hur. “The comments that were made by that prosecutor [were] gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate,” she said. “The way that the president’s demeanour in that report was characterised could not be more wrong.” Hur would be vindicated, but only after the most tumultuous and painful re-election campaign since Jimmy Carter’s 1980 disaster. “The moment where I don’t think you can say that there’s innocence is after the Hur report, because then it becomes an active campaign to discredit him, to discredit their own justice department,” Thompson says. Tapper adds, “Some of the most damning stuff, I think, comes from what Garland concludes at the end of the book, that Biden actually never wanted an independent justice department even though he said he did.”
Tapper dates what he believes to be a cover-up earlier. “In October 2023, they have their last cabinet meeting for almost a year. We have a cabinet secretary saying that’s when things started getting weird. They would never see the president. They would never talk to the president. The one time one of the cabinet secretaries saw Biden, he was completely out of it. It started becoming more difficult for people to see the president.”
In the wake of the Hur report, The Wall Street Journal began investigating Biden’s mental acuity and published its findings on June 4 under the headline “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping”. This began by describing a meeting on Ukraine funding in January with congressional leaders when, it reported, Biden “read from notes to make obvious points, paused for extended periods and sometimes closed his eyes for so long that some in the room wondered whether he had tuned out”.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, rejected the story as “false claims” by Republicans, adding that Biden was “a savvy and effective leader”.
But besides the challenge of domestic and international crises, family issues were also a burden that appeared to take a heavy toll.
‘The terror for Biden is that he is going to lose a third child’
The other central figure in the Biden tragedy is his troubled son Hunter. He was an Achilles’ heel, having carelessly abandoned a laptop full of sordid photos of drug-taking with alleged prostitutes and emails that suggested dodgy business schemes to enrich the Biden family. Yet in Biden’s mind, Hunter became a chief reason for digging in. He appeared to be turning his life around, with a new wife and child (named Beau, for his late brother) and a mission to help his father win re-election. “Hunter became the unofficial chief-of-staff in terms of his dad’s decisions,” Tapper says. Biden became convinced that if he didn’t run, Hunter could lose his sense of purpose and relapse. But the book ties the president’s mental decline closely to Hunter’s woes. A plea deal to keep him out of jail for lying to obtain a gun fell apart in July 2023, leading him to be found guilty at trial in June 2024. After both highly stressful moments there was a noticeable deterioration in Biden, the authors report. “You couldn’t write this if you were Shakespeare,” Tapper says. “It is not just the burden of what Hunter’s going through; there’s the terror for Biden that he is going to lose a third child, that Hunter is going to kill himself.”
Shortly after Hunter’s conviction, with a potential jail sentence to follow later in the year, an emotionally exhausted Biden headed to Camp David with the Politburo to prepare for his TV debate with Trump. Instead of reading background material, Biden mostly slept through the whole first day, the book claims. Steven Spielberg joined some sessions remotely, but not even Hollywood’s most successful director could help. Biden’s voice was hard to hear — he kept asking for cough drops — his answers were “all over the place” and he spent afternoons dozing in his cabin.
Tapper had a front-row seat at the debate in Atlanta on June 27 as one of the two moderators with his CNN colleague Dana Bash. Biden looked wan and sounded hoarse from the start. During a rambling answer on the national debt and tax cuts he lost his thread. “We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do, childcare, elder care,” he said, beginning a sentence that would meander and die and sink his re-election hopes. “Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the, er, Covid — excuse me…” Biden looked down. “Dealing with everything we have to do with, er…” Biden made some noises as if straining. “Look, if…” He was in deep trouble. This was awful. He suddenly looked up, as if he’d had an insight. “We finally beat Medicare.” It made no sense at all. “Thank you, President Biden,” Tapper said, moving to Trump. Bash passed a scribbled note to Tapper: “He just lost the election.” In the Trump watch room, campaign co‑manager Chris LaCivita turned to his colleague, Susie Wiles. “Oh, f***,” LaCivita said. “He’s not going to last.” He was already trying to figure out what Biden’s withdrawal would mean for the Trump campaign.
The authors toured high-level Democratic watch parties around the United States. At an exclusive Los Angeles gathering of A-list supporters, the director Rob Reiner said to the actress Jane Fonda, “We are f***ed.” Among members of Congress watching in Washington DC, a Democrat in a vulnerable seat turned to Pete Aguilar, chair of the caucus, and said, “I just lost my job.” At a party in Atlanta, the Biden Victory Fund finance chair, Chris Korge, was overheard echoing Reiner’s words: “We are totally f***ed. This is over.”
‘We have to have the president’s back’
The period between the debate and July 21, when Biden dropped out of the race, became known by Democrats as “the bad times” or “the dark times”. The recriminations burst into public but were worse in private. State governors were brought together to hear from Biden. He told them his polling showed he was “the best person to go up against Trump”, and, “The polls also say that people aren’t concerned with my health, that folks are much more concerned with saving democracy. [They] actually haven’t changed since the debate.” Some governors questioned whether they were being lied to, or if Biden was deluded or being fed misinformation by his team. Hawaii governor Josh Green, a doctor, asked Biden if he was OK. Colorado governor Jared Polis said voters were panicking and donors felt lied to about his condition. But before each governor had a chance to speak, Harris brought the meeting to a close. “We have to have the president’s back,” she said. “It’s our f***ing democracy at stake.”
It was not clear whether Ricchetti and Donilon were letting Biden know about the true data, which showed an overwhelming majority of voters thought him too old to be president again. Internal meetings became increasingly fraught. At one private gathering on Capitol Hill, a black congresswoman argued that if Biden went, Harris would be left with an impossible task. She would lose “and everyone’s going to blame black people”. Such were the dynamics unleashed by Biden’s original sin.
Biden released a letter on July 8 emphasising his crushing victory in the primary, even though his only opponents were mavericks because no senior players wanted to rock the boat. This was the final straw for George Clooney, who had bottled up all the concerns raised by Biden’s dreadful appearance at a Los Angeles fundraiser a month earlier. It was time for his cameo. Clooney’s article for The New York Times, published on July 10, concluded, “We are not going to win in November with this president.” There was speculation that Clooney consulted Barack Obama before writing the article and was given a green light by the former president, but the authors are not convinced. “Clooney reached out to him to tell him he was going to write this op-ed but Obama suggested that doing so would be counterproductive,” Tapper says.
Only five senators indicated support for Biden
This was also the moment Nancy Pelosi, the former house speaker and éminence grise of the party, pounced. A CBS News poll suggested that 72 per cent of Americans did not think Biden should serve another term. The book details a secret meeting Pelosi held with Biden later on July 10. That morning she had given cover to Democrats calling for Biden to withdraw by telling MSNBC he was still weighing his decision. Pelosi asked him what polls he was looking at that made him think the election was winnable. Biden insisted on putting Donilon on speakerphone. Reagan and Obama had bad debates, Donilon said, and polling showed Biden “within the margin of error”. Pelosi said many people she knew were saying their voting-age kids were not going to vote for Biden, even though they believed in the Democrats’ pro-abortion, climate change-focused agenda. She won a promise from Biden that he would speak directly to the pollsters.
• Wheelchair, falls and a cover-up: Key claims in bombshell Biden book
On July 11, Democratic senators met privately. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania called for a show of hands from those who were “with the president”. Of 51 senators in the room, there were reports that no more than 5 indicated their support for Biden. In one of the biggest scoops of the book, Tapper and Thompson reproduce the wording of a devastating letter Pelosi wrote following Biden’s performance hosting a Nato summit in Washington later that day. Apart from introducing President Zelensky as President Putin and referring to Harris as Trump during his press conference, the meeting appeared to go well and confirmed western support for Ukraine. “A masterclass press conference showing mastery of foreign policy,” Pelosi wrote to Biden. “A positive grassroots event in Detroit. Not a reason to stay, but a way to go out on top.” Pelosi put it in an envelope, had it delivered to the Oval Office and never heard back from him.
‘I’m urging you not to run’
During a Zoom call with senior left-wing Progressive Democrats on July 13, Biden became tetchy with a group that was inclined to support him. He was handed a note by his staff, which the president read aloud. “Stay positive. You are sounding defensive,” he said. Some of the Progressives were left bewildered and dismayed. Tapper and Thompson give a detailed account of another meeting, this time between Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democrat Senate caucus, and Biden at his weekend home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. “Schumer is a man used to tough conversations,” Thompson says. “As far as we can tell, he was the only Democrat to tell [Biden] directly to his face, you should step down.” According to the authors, Schumer said, “Mr President, your chances of winning are only 5 per cent. I’ve talked to your pollsters.”
“Really?” Biden said.
“They’re not telling you,” Schumer said of Donilon and Ricchetti. “I’m urging you not to run.”
“Do you think Kamala can win?” Biden reportedly asked.
“I don’t know,” Schumer said. “I just know that you cannot.”
This was the weekend before the Republican convention, the four-yearly event to crown their presidential candidate. Biden told him he needed another week.
The rise and fall of Biden
Biden was behind in all the swing states
Things were about to get even more intense. While they talked, Trump was hit on the ear by a bullet and a supporter was killed in an assassination attempt during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. But it was not until July 18, the night of Trump’s big speech, that Biden, along with Donilon and Ricchetti, finally hosted a Zoom meeting with his three main pollsters. What he heard was grim, the book claims. He was behind in all the swing states and now three states that he won comfortably in 2020 — Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia — were getting close. Trump had a 12-point advantage with new voters. The view that Biden was too old for a second term was settled in a large majority of voters’ minds. There was simply no way to sell Biden any more — the most positive argument the pollsters could come up with was that the presidency was a team game.
On Saturday, July 20, Ricchetti phoned one of the pollsters. “You’re supposed to tell us how to win, not that we can’t. Donilon has been looking at the data and has come to a different conclusion,” he reportedly told him. It seemed like the Politburo still could not accept the obvious. But later that day Ricchetti and Donilon went to Rehoboth Beach. They told Biden he could tough out the convention less than a month away in Chicago but the party would be split. “They’re acknowledging that it’s going to be a bloodbath at the convention,” Tapper says. Two thirds of Democrats in Congress wanted the president to drop out. Money would be hard to raise.
‘It was not a gracious bowing out’
“We need a unified party,” Biden said, according to the authors. He told his aides he would sleep on it. Donilon went home and wrote an announcement Biden could issue the next day.
“It was not a gracious bowing out,” Thompson says. “Biden is left very bitter and feeling he was betrayed.” His final act was to close down debate about a quick, competitive process for his replacement by endorsing Harris. “He still was bothered by Obama not endorsing him in 2016 [when instead of backing his VP, Obama supported Hillary Clinton] and he didn’t want to do that to Harris,” Tapper says. “Also, picking the first African-American woman vice-president in history was, he felt, an important part of his legacy. Plus, if there had been an open primary process starting July 21, the sitting vice-president would almost certainly have won.” There was also a message from the powerful Congressional Black Caucus, articulated by Bobby Scott, a veteran representative from Virginia, delivered in a meeting of all House Democrats. “If you think the person taking his place will be anyone other than Kamala, you are the senile one.”
Despite the sense of inevitability about Biden’s implosion conveyed in the book, compiled from 200 or so post-election interviews, the authors are bracing for significant blowback on at least two fronts once it is published next week. On the one hand there are critics already decrying the idea of journalists who did little to expose Biden’s fragility throughout his presidency now claiming to tell the inside story, and on the other hand there is the Politburo who still believe Biden would have beaten Trump. “I would have loved to know any of this and break it last year,” Tapper says. “I mean, we learnt all this after the election. We weren’t wise to this. We saw it the way everybody else saw it, which was, yeah, he looked bad, but everybody behind the scenes was saying he was fine. And then came the debate.”
Thompson recently won an award for his work last year to reveal Biden’s cognitive decline, including a scoop vigorously denied at the time by the White House about how Biden was only “dependably engaged” from 10am till 4pm. But he used his acceptance speech to state some hard lessons. “Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story,” Thompson said. “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception.”
Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Hutchinson Heinemann, £25) is published on May 20. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members