Jake Tapper's Biden Book is Hilarious and Insane

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's mass media apologia is leaps and bounds more demented than the book's subject, Joe Biden

It was this guy’s fault!

I wasn’t going to do it, really. After stepping to the edge of nervous collapse of late, I promised, no more Conventional Wisdom Bestsellers. I saw Abundance in an airport and turned away before registering cover art. I had the same plan for Original Sin, the “controversial” book in which CNN’s Jake Tapper teams with Alex Thompson of Axios to get real about the media and Joe Biden’s health. One moment of late-night weakness later, I was reading from Chapter One, “He Totally Fucked Us”:

No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error. But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden. Harris, loyal to Biden to a fault, might never say such a thing. But plenty of people around her would… “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us.. Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed 107-day race was “a fucking nightmare.”

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. Referring to Biden’s decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: “He totally fucked us.”

Holy catfish! I thought from online buzz that Original Sin was a mea culpa. It would own press failures to cover Joe Biden’s infirmity in a super-belated version of Canadian comic Bruce McCullough’s “I’m sorry I caused all that cancer” routine. But Original Sin isn’t that. It’s much crazier! Instead of a dreary and predictable book-length excuse for thousands of media professionals simultaneously whiffing on the most obvious story in history, it’s an ambitious book-length effort to absolve all concerned, pin an industry’s coverage mistake on its President Droolcup subject (a gambit many times ballsier than blaming one reporter, à la Judith Miller), all while additionally swirling a new storm system of bullshit storylines to delay more serious questions about things like who was just president for four years.

It’s the opposite of a mea culpa and the literary degree of difficulty is awesome, equivalent to a blind unicyclist trying to juggle six chainsaws. Do Jake and Alex pull it off? They don’t! But they sure leave a hell of a lot of blood on stage:

The book’s opening lines tell us we’re supposed to be shocked by Joe Biden’s delusional state:

President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged… The elites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again… His pollsters told us that no such polls existed…

The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news.

Reading this, you may experience a memory double-take. Wasn’t the public told repeatedly that after last year’s infamous debate between Biden and Donald Trump very little had changed, there was “less polling damage than expected,” and “few of the results reflect a radically altered race,” as NBC put it? Didn’t we see high-profile polls during the post-debate period Tapper/Thompson tell us were known in the White House as “The Bad Times,” showing Biden in the lead? Was I high and now misremembering, or did NPR senior politics editor Domenico Montanaro insist on July 12th that a PBS/Marist poll that put Biden ahead 50-48 meant “the race really hasn’t changed all that dramatically since the debate”?

There were less optimistic takes, and in fairness Tapper’s CNN ran perhaps the bleakest coverage of Biden’s prospects after the “disastrous” debate, but if Biden read the same news as the rest of us, he’d have every reason to think he was doing fine, even after the debate. There may not have been post-election polls showing he’d have done better than Kamala Harris, but among all these clowns Joe Biden is the only one to actually beat Donald Trump in an election, and unless the public was lied to on a grand scale, there was reason to think he was viable. None of that however compares to the charge that Biden was somehow to blame for the Harris loss:

Harris made plenty of mistakes, both before Biden became a candidate and afterward, but no decision that she and her campaign made was anywhere near as consequential as his decision to run for re-election and pretend he wasn’t mentally melting before our eyes… “It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”

In the introduction, Tapper and Thompson explain theirs is a literary porridge not too hot, not too cold, but just right. Those who are “convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here,” they write, while those who insist he was “unaddled” to the end and “his rumored deterioration was all right-wing propaganda” are just as wrong.

I belong in the first camp, writing in Rolling Stone before his election that Biden “on multiple occasions looked close to grabbing prospective voters by the ears and speed-eating their faces off” and “often he looks around like he expects a thumbs-up for giving in to his rage-response.” He verbally and physically badgered voters in every state, and there was no shortage of quotable Democrats upset the issue was being blown off. “They’re so used to events where everyone is rooting for them,” said Tracye Redd, one of multiple people Biden sternum-poked in Iowa. He routinely held voters’ hands or forearms for too long (“We’re talking minutes,” a woman in Cedar Rapids said), got Way Too Close to peoples’ faces, became confrontational, and slurred words, all at once. His campaign heading into the first caucus was “like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything.” It was a mess, impossible to not see:

Anyone who recalls this will find it very hard to take the Tapper/Thompson line that Biden was fine at the start but not at the end, and at some point in between his incapacity became obvious enough to be “melting before our eyes,” only not so obvious that anyone but Biden could be blamed for lying about it. It hurts my brain to think about the math of that one. The book is also filled with passages like:

Millions were shocked by Biden’s unintelligible, slack-jawed performance at the debate, but some Democrats weren’t surprised at all. Though they had seen him like this behind closed doors, they didn’t say anything. For a variety of reasons, they rationalized their silence.

These passages make no sense juxtaposed as they frequently are next to someone f-bombing Biden and blaming the entire loss on him. How do the people who said nothing not get mixed in the blame pie? And what interesting people there are on that list! Take this passage, in which top Democrats consider how to come up with a replacement candidate on July 3rd of last year, before Biden stepped down:

There was one thing everyone at the White House seemed to agree upon: An open primary process would be a disaster… That’s not how two éminences grises in the party saw it. Privately, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi favored some sort of process. Pelosi in particular heard from voting-rights activists who insisted on such a thing. The Obama/Pelosi position would be viewed by the Harris camp as skepticism of Harris’s political abilities.

This is one of many times I would have liked to hear from a lawyer, historian, or anyone who could speak to the propriety of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi blithely discussing how to replace a sitting president outside the scope of the constitutional process designed for this situation, the 25th Amendment. The detail about Pelosi having “heard” from “voting-rights activists” about potential unhappiness with a closed process hits my ear as pure nuttery (only one of these toffs even considers the opinion of voters in all this, and Pelosi only really worries about what “voting-rights activists” might say), but to Tapper/Thompson, it all sounds fine. Yet we also get passages like this:

Ponder the question… if Biden had not run for reelection, or if he had acknowledged his decay and changed his mind about it in 2023, what would have happened?

If history is any guide, a competitive primary and caucus process would have produced a stronger Democratic nominee, one who had more experience with debates and taking questions from reporters, one with a more cogent and precise answer as to why they were running, one with time to introduce themselves to the American people. Would that candidate have been able to do 1.5 percentage points better in Michigan, 1.8 points better in Pennsylvania, and 0.9 points better in Wisconsin? To the Plouffes of the world, it’s hard to argue no.

“If Biden had decided in 2023 to drop out, we would have had a robust primary,” Plouffe said.

Thompson and Tapper know well that the entire party vetoed the idea of an “open primary.” There’s a long chapter titled “Dean Phillips” that chronicles, weirdly and incompletely, the abject process by which challengers were excluded from any kind of primary process. Though a lot of the worst shenanigans are left out, the two authors nonetheless note “it was machine-style politics to ensure that Biden would be the nominee… Phillips could not get Biden on a stage to prove his point. And the entire Democratic Party apparatus went along with it.”

If “the entire Democratic Party apparatus” went along with spiking a “robust primary,” how can it be “all Biden” who “fucked us” by refusing to “acknowledge his decay” and quit? I don’t know Thompson and don’t have anything against Tapper, but it’s all a classic Washington hive-braineurysm. The story is all told from the vantage point of characters like “one prominent Democrat,” “one senior White House aide,” and Barack Obama, who like the God of the Old Testament communicates not through words but omniscient narration (“Obama’s phone was blowing up with texts”; “Obama had arrived at the conclusion that Biden didn’t have a path”; “Obama… never directly told Biden not to run”). Collectively they offer every conceivable self-serving excuse, even ones that contradict one another before the end of the sentence.

I was partial to the unnamed Democrat above who denounced the “abomination” of Biden’s decision but “publicly defended Biden,” or the “top Democrat who called the White House and said, “Every day I’m defending this guy… Someone tell me he’s okay. Like, it doesn’t look great.” If it doesn’t look great, why are you defending him? The same person snitches out Biden aides Anita Dunn, Jeff Zients, and Mike Donilon for not being straight about Biden’s condition, but that person was doing the same thing to the public (and in a sense still is by staying anonymous). It’s all good because they’re talking to each other, not Actual People, or Republicans, or other inconsequential humans. As Megyn Kelly and others noted, the book blows off the conservative media figures who were on Biden’s problems from the jump and absolutely should take that omission as an insult. Still, it’s more indicative of how this book’s sources think, or more where they think; on a different plane, somewhere above.

Meanwhile the authors never address the monstrous ethical/legal issues that should be at issue in a book whose apparent revelations are about Biden’s incapacity being more extensive than known. Who was making decisions in that case, not just about who should be Run Against Trump (all these people seem to care about), but everything?

Obama is so ubiquitous and so ferociously tongue-bathed in Original Sin that I found myself wondering at that as an alternate narrative. What if the submarining of the primary to guarantee Zombie Joe’s re-nomination was Obama’s idea (it’s put more on “leaders of the Democratic Party” in the book), or the scheme to oust Biden was Obama’s idea and Biden unexpectedly stuck them with Harris, or it’s a combination of that and more and this is a P.R. offensive to get in front of some brave Democrat thinking about spilling? Tapper right now is getting toasted by everyone from Jon Stewart to Hunter Biden for saying things like, “I do not accept that I was part of a cover-up,” but I almost feel like that’s too serious a criticism for a book like this. People should more find it funny, for its sheer irrelevance and circle-jerkness. Is it wrong to be entertained, or is that the least this kind of media can do for us?