A Trump Biographer Explains Why You Don’t Hate the New Jake Tapper Book About Joe Biden Nearly As Much As You Should
It may be one of the most cynical cash grabs in publishing history. It’s also going to be one of the most lucrative betrayals of conventional journalistic practice ever. And it’s worse than you think.
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Introduction
Though I’m not a book critic anymore—I did such work professionally at HuffPost for years in the 2010s, but left that particular writing practice in 2015—I do have a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and another relevant terminal degree, an MFA in Writing. So I feel like I’m a reasonable person to review the new book by CNN journalist Jake Tapper and a colleague, especially as it falls into my current area of specialization: contemporary politics and political analysis, with an emphasis on presidential politics.
More than this—and in a way more relevant, now that Tapper’s Original Sin, which focuses on the presidency and political career of Joe Biden, is on pace to be one of the bestselling U.S. political books in years—I’ve published several national bestsellers about a U.S. president myself. Not just any president, either, but the chief political rival (Donald Trump) of the politician (Biden) Tapper’s book is about. The political lives of these two men are so entwined, in fact, that one of my books about President Trump, Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020) is in many ways primarily a book about Biden (inasmuch as the titular “corruption” was an attempt by Trump to frame Biden for things the latter didn’t do).
This last point gives me some additional qualification to write a very lengthy review of Tapper’s book, as while the New York Times bestsellers of my Proof Series never sold (nor will ever sell) even a fraction of what Original Sin will, I can recognize in Original Sin—almost right away, give how much of Tapper’s foci temporally overlap with my own—a book intended to frame Biden, and in this case many members of his family and advisory corps to boot, for things he didn’t do. It’s quite Trumpian in that sense.
For all this, I’m not going to here delve—at least not in any detail—into all the other ways this new book is Trumpian, whether it’s a national book tour that doubles as a liberals-apologizing-to-malfeasors self-flagellation pilgrimage to repeated attempts by Tapper to turn his own failures as an author and journalist into a political cause célèbre—one in which a couple of podcasting jokers facetiously asking if Tapper’s son likes minorities after the CNN anchor revealed that his son aims to be a cop becomes, in Tapper’s irate retelling of the incident, an example of why the Democratic Party is dying. (Spoiler alert: apparently it’s because a light-hearted reference to acknowledged past police brutality—a landslide of high-profile events that have happened on camera over the last four decades and are inarguable—turns off young white males who like the police in a way Donald Trump being a thirty-four-times-convicted criminal and pardoning hundreds and hundreds of January 6 cop-beaters and calling U.S. soldiers “losers and suckers” and dodging the Vietnam draft five times and being in the process of gleefully destroying all our federal law enforcement agencies doesn’t. The feigned indignation we’re now seeing from Tapper, at a time that far-right American whites who only support the police when they’re policing minorities are perhaps the only audience he has left, almost makes it seem as though it’s Tapper and his fellow journalists—many of them white dads—who failed to educate a generation of young white men about which of the two major U.S. political parties still values rule of law.)
There are plenty of essays out there expressing enormous vitriol toward Original Sin and Tapper, a journalist whose cable-news employer never met a Donald Trump lie, criminal offense, or scandal it couldn’t ignore, misreport, underreport, normalize, misconstrue, or otherwise minimize in ways that led to Trump’s reelection far more than anything Joe Biden or Kamala Harris ever did. So it’s the aim of this long essay to explain, instead, why and how Original Sin came to be as bad as it is, and to do so by going well beyond the most obvious reason it’s bad: because Tapper and his publisher, Penguin, heard Scrooge McDuck-like cartoon cash registers ringing in their ears at the notion of lambasting a defeated presidential candidate and doing so in a way both far-right conspiracy theorists and spineless left-wing Monday-morning quarterbacks can enjoy. Tapper’s authorial offenses, and his publisher’s dubious ethical practices, go well beyond mere greed, however, and into infelicities that are at once literary and ethical, historical and conceptual, practical and narrative.
Original Sin is a bad book intended to be read by people bad at reading books.
It has value only to the extent that a reader already believes to be true the many untrue things the book says—or, as we will soon see, the many untrue things that the book, in its myriad craven ways, implies.
Indeed, Original Sin is a book heavy on biased framing devices, semantic games, rank innuendo, poor sourcing, and calculated elisions. It’s light on any evidence that the nation was deceived by the 2024 Biden campaign. The pièce de résistance in Tapper’s flimsy case, to the extent it’s a case at all, is a June 2024 presidential debate Proof has already written about at length and on multiple occasions (see also here, here, and here). Readers interested in this essay should find much of interest in those others.
There’s undoubtedly a great deal of soul-searching every American needs to do in the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Much of that soul-searching needs to be done by the corporate media enterprise Jake Tapper is a part of, as polling shows that very few people who went to the polls in November of 2024 had any idea what was going on in the country—an informational abscess that major media is responsible for in the first instance and the Democratic Party (which relies, as the GOP, on media of some form or another to gets its message out) only secondarily. But few avid observers of major media ever believed that major-media figures like Tapper would do any soul-searching post-election; indeed, it’s not just “on-brand” for corporate media to blame others for its own errors but it’s actually become the bulk of corporate media’s brand: the central feature of conventional major-media reportage in this era of U.S. history is to try to retain market share by presenting itself as infallible and unfairly targeted.
In this era, corporate media reports the news in whatever way it believes will maximize revenue, and then acts scandalized when such contraventions of journalistic mores and such cynical performativity pleases (and more importantly, illuminates) precisely no one. To read the social media feeds of many high-profile journalists these days is to be plowed under by just how close to the surface their shocking privilege, lack of self-reflection, and enduring bitterness is. These are personalities convinced that they’ve been failed by others, not that they’ve ever failed themselves; they blame critics, not themselves, whenever their failures are brought in for public scrutiny; and they couldn’t more plainly relegate readers to the category of rabble if they said so outright.
But even they must realize this state of affairs isn’t ideal. Surely it’s preferable to find some major public figure to blame for the American voting population being cruelly undereducated about even basic facts on the ground in American life today. And since corporate media loses market share every time it even thinks about pointing to Donald Trump as the but-for cause of nearly every ill in the United States in 2025—though in truth one could very credibly make that case—why not go after the Bidens, instead? Few Americans know that Biden’s presidency is ranked by nonpartisan historians as one of the most accomplished in U.S. history, so perhaps he can be easily sniped at?
There’s also, surely, some political soul-searching to be done by Democrats—the party polls show most Americans agree with on nearly every issue, the party consistently a better steward (all the hard data confirm) of the economy than the GOP, the party that didn’t try to overthrow American democracy this decade, that consistently has fewer scandals and indictments per administration, that is not led by a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist, and that is not compromised by hostile foreign powers who now with shocking predictability illegally aid its political campaigns every few years (see the Proof Series for far more on that specific topic than you could ever wish to read).
It’s true: the Democrats are considerably worse at messaging than today’s fascists are, which is candidly little surprise given that fascism is definitionally messaging without substance and, unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party actually has ideas about governance and things it wants to do in government besides grandstand.
Democrats trying to communicate to an electorate in the face of the utter collapse of professional journalism, the failure of our justice system to police federal crimes, the disinterest of our intelligence community in apprehending traitors to our nation and the persistent gullibility (and racial and ethnic animus) of the median American is like the Bad News Bears trying to defeat the Dallas Cowboys on the gridiron. Sure, the Bears are categorically incompetent, but the real issue is that they’re not football players.
The other issue is that observers, in this analogy U.S. corporate media, are throwing objects at the players in a manic frenzy, and almost exclusively at the luckless Bears.
So it was—and is—with one of the most odious books in years, Tapper’s Original Sin.
A Few of the Possibly Hundreds of Major, Deal-Breaking Issues With Jake Tapper’s New National Bestseller
(1) The facts don’t match the framing. Tapper and his publisher knew that the book’s framing—title, subtitle, jacket copy, blurbs, and advance squibs—would make them rich, as anything suggesting Donald Trump has been right about Joe Biden all along will be lapped up by far-right media and far-right consumers, especially given the near-certainty Trump is going to now promote the book as casting all his conspiracy theories about Biden as accurate. The problem is that within mere pages of opening the book readers discover that all that framing was fabulism; early on, we’re told that Barack Obama—one of the biggest (and privately, most vocal) opponents of Joe Biden continuing his political career after 2016—met with him one-on-one in June of 2023, exactly the point at which a decision on whether Biden would run in 2024 had to be made, and the much-beloved former president found Biden to be “fine” in terms of his mental acuity. Thus we find a smoking gun of sorts—just pages into a 352-page tome—that on its face had assured us that every discerning objective observer in Biden’s orbit (and Obama, given his circumspection about Biden’s post-2016 political career, surely qualifies) knew he was a wreck before the time for him to decide about 2024 arrived.
Apparently not.
(2) The book’s sources couldn’t be trusted—and the authors knew this in advance. No one would suggest that the Biden Family or their closest associates as reliable sources for a book like this one… for the same reason no journalist would think that Biden’s political enemies would be good sources for a book like this one, as the latter would see their interviews with Tapper as, variously, (i) an opportunity to settle old political scores, (ii) an opportunity to shape history’s view of those to whom they are loyal (be it Harris or any of the other Democrats Tapper assures us, unconvincingly, would have been well-received by American voters notably more than Biden), or (iii) an opportunity to absolve the whole Democratic Party and/or the whole corporate media edifice in the United States of so under-inspiring or misinforming the voting public that by the time the presidential election arrived in 2024 the real problem was that voters had no idea what Biden had accomplished, what the actual state of the country was, or how unreliable any promises then being made by Donald Trump were.
Yet for all this, Tapper almost exclusively relies on sources who fit into one of these three just-as-likely-to-be-subjective-as-the-Biden-Family categories—except, that is, when Tapper is assuring us (without any proof) that literally everyone in the public was profoundly disgusted by Biden’s age and incompetence. In Original Sin you get sly versions of Trump’s infamous “many people say” on the regular, usually couched in subtly non-journalistic verbiage.
(3) All necessary context has been eliminated. The 2024 presidential election was one of the most unique in American history, not that you’d know it from reading Original Sin—which is so laser-focused on one minute component of the campaign that future readers will learn virtually nothing about the 2024 election writ large by reading it. For instance, consider the following: the claim that the general public was convinced President Biden wasn’t up to the job is contradicted by early 2024 polls being close, by Biden being in the midst of a presidency that nonpartisan historians agree per formal voting is one of the best in American history, by oodles of polling data showing that actually most voters were tuned out from politics in early 2024, and by President Biden deliberately, from the moment of his inauguration, choosing to be considerably less publicly visible than his predecessor—who didn’t so much govern or achieve anything as prance about online—making it a bizarre claim to say the general public had seen so much of Joe Biden by 2024 that had disturbed it that the polling reflected (though in fact it didn’t) a widespread conclusion amongst voters that Biden was utterly finished.
And all this is just the tip of the iceberg of context that Tapper somehow at once avoids altogether and crashes into Titanically. The fact that Joe Biden was running against the most prolific liar and gaslighter in the history of American politics is somehow not relevant in noting how angry voters were or were not about (allegedly) being lied to and gaslit by Mr. Biden, even as Biden’s accomplishments in office are merely glossed over in a few words and the fact that Donald Trump had just recently tried to violently overthrow the government is almost not worth mentioning at all.
And why must none of this context be foregrounded? Because the thesis of the book, stated early on, is that Joe Biden’s age was the “but-for” cause of the second Trump administration. We are told, that is—and quite directly, at that—that it was Biden and Biden alone who handed the election to Trump, and who therefore is the sole person responsible for Trump’s re-election. Not coincidentally, this is the narrative that Mr. Tapper knew in advance his sources were looking to peddle for their own eldritch reasons.
(4) The book is buried lede after buried lede. Why does it take until Chapter 4—the fifth chapter of the book, in total—for Tapper to reveal that Biden has been forgetting his staffers’ names since the 1970s? Why is this also the first chapter in which Tapper admits that Biden staffers telling those around them that Biden was doing fine in 2024 could have been a result of “Boiling Frog Syndrome” (that is, the idea that the people closest to a glacial phenomenon are least likely to notice it)?
Certainly, one reason for this is that Tapper and his publisher know how books are read these days: namely, not at all. The aim of a political book release in the 2020s, as I can say from personal experience after speaking to multiple trade-press editors about to release such a book, is to tease the “sizzle” in the book (trade-press terminology for the three or four juiciest bits of likely unimportant gossip in the text) while assuring readers that the “meat” still remains on the bone—in the book—which you’ll have to buy to consume. But in practice, it usually turns out that empty sizzle is all the book has, which turns readers into little more than customers at a museum gift shop: you buy the book as a souvenir of an experience you already had, the relevant experience being a television interview in which you saw a book’s author assure you in responsible tones that their work confirms all your existing beliefs. So how many Trump voters bought this book? Many. And how many got to Chapter 4? Almost none. How many will now wave the book around to houseguests going forward as evidence that their conspiracy theories are taken seriously by serious “lefty journalists”? Almost all.
This seemingly inevitable dynamic rears its head again and again in Original Sin. Why is it not until Chapter 6 that we find Tapper conceding that “covering for an aging politician is commonplace in Washington,” and “There may be no world in which this toxic dysfunction [covering up the ravages of age] is tolerated as much as in politics”? For that matter, why do so very many of the examples Tapper gives of this involve Republicans? Wouldn’t that be a critical point to make early on in the book? Well, yes, but who would buy the book, then?
Do we really believe that Tapper could make the point that Republicans more or less invented hiding leaders’ medical conditions—from Richard Nixon’s alcoholism and obsession with sleeping pills to Ronald Reagan’s dementia to current leader Donald Trump’s unprecedented lies about every aspect of his physical, mental, psychological, and emotional health—while giving interviews on Fox News? To Megyn Kelly’s pod? No, of course not. Original Sin itself may have exceedingly little meat to it, but every interview about it surely must, for marketing purposes, leave listeners with a sense of sizzle that sounds roughly like a vile far-left-wing conspiracy whose like the nation’s capital has never seen before.
(5) Tapper spends most of the book arguing against his book’s thesis. The premise that has made Original Sin a national bestseller is not that Joe Biden has struggled with memory and rambling and verbal diahrrea since the 1970s, nor even that he struggled with these components of public and private communication at the start of his sole term as POTUS. No—the premise is that Joe Biden declined so noticeably in his basic cognitive abilities during his term that it was clear he shouldn’t run for reelection by early 2023. The problem with this thesis is that Tapper has so much book space to fill, and so little sizzle—or for that matter meat—to offer readers that he spends chapter after chapter trying to establish that (my phrase for it) “Biden was always Biden,” i.e. that Biden had been the same person for decades, from the 1970s to 2020, 2021, and 2022. On its face, this narrative, to the extent one need credit it at all, argues against the idea that any Biden aide or family member had cause to see a marked change in Biden in 2023 such that failing to ring the national bell on that subject constituted, as Tapper gleefully calls it, “a cover-up” (he also terms Biden aides and family members “accomplices,” the better to imply crimes occurred at a time that Tapper is aware the Trump team is looking to pursue precisely such evidence-free, cockamamie claims).
(6) Tapper spends much of the book padding his book’s thesis with irrelevant trivia. For instance, we learn, in Original Sin, that Biden’s advisory corps at some point—perhaps just once, we don’t know—facetiously referred to itself as “the Politburo,” which of course Tapper chooses to take seriously. We learn that as Joe Biden faced the hardest job of his life, being President of the United States, his wife became more protective of him and more involved in his daily scheduling, a development that we’re implicitly invited to see as evidence of her being an accomplice to a conspiracy rather than something that any loving spouse would do under the circumstances. By the same token, Michelle Obama’s annoyance at how the Biden Family treated Hunter Biden’s ex-wife is… detailed here, for some reason? The reason is never provided, least of all when this supposed Michelle-Biden tension is vaguely alluded to as a possible reason for Michelle not being as involved as she might have been in the 2020 U.S. presidential election (Tapper is forced to admit—and forced to admit because it’s a universally known fact—that Michelle primarily didn’t participate in the campaign much because she hates politics). So, again, why are we subjected to all this trivia? Purely so some of the sleaze organically produced by Hunter—a uniquely pathetic individual—will rub off on his parents, though what that has to do with the book’s thesis and subject matter remains unclear.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a Biden official informed White House residence staffers that they wouldn’t be needed to accompany Biden on his elevator trips—an obvious accommodation to the realities of the pandemic and the need to keep Biden from unnecessary physical interactions. Yet Tapper darkly implies that this easily explainable logistical maneuver could have had some conspiratorial dimension. His evidence for this? There’s none, apparently, besides the fact that at least one former anonymous residence staffer was willing to make sufficient (wholly speculative) noises in the direction Tapper clearly wanted them to go in that this scurrilous implication was permitted into the book. In Chapter 5, Tapper, writing in summary form, assures us that residence staffers told him age was taking its toll on the president; but when he quotes them directly, all they say is that he seemed “tired” and “quiet” and averse to “small talk,” observations perfectly consistent with the Biden administration’s own explanation, from the jump, for most of Tapper’s suspicions about the president’s cognitive health: that the President of the United States was overworked, and it tired him out badly. Tapper’s need to imply that this was age taking a cognitive rather than physical toll is palpable throughout Chapter 5, even as, again, he provides no specific evidence on that score.
So much of this book comprises Tapper shading Biden’s decision-making processes being different from Obama’s as a sign of cognitive decline rather than the two men simply being very different politicians, thinkers, and people. It’s all tea-leaf reading.
(7) The most important narrative counterweight in telling this story has been elided almost completely. Because Joe Biden was deliberately, starting in January 2021, a retiring and largely nonpublic POTUS, it’s silly to say that America was thrust into a daily realization of his aging. In fact, as Tapper oddly refuses to admit, far and away the leading source of information on Biden’s age—to the extent that this source didn’t shut up about it for even a single day for three-plus years—was Donald Trump. So if an author is going to claim that voters were let down by how the reality they (allegedly) regularly saw didn’t match what they were being told, we’d have to, in fact, match what Tapper admits were carefully controlled and relatively few public appearances by Biden against… well, Trump’s daily lies on the same subject, right? Surely Tapper delves deep into those lies, then? He does not. And why not? Because Mr. Trump so vociferously lied about Joe Biden’s mental state on a daily basis for many years, falsely claiming that Biden was experiencing such advanced dementia that he didn’t even know his own name, that if Tapper were to acknowledge that this is what voters were actually hearing about Biden on a daily basis he would have to then concede that it was Trump who was gaslighting America about Biden’s health, not Biden or his team.
In fact, nothing Trump said about Biden turned out to be true—whereas (see supra) as late as Summer 2023, a little over a year before Election Day, one of the biggest critics of Biden still being in politics at all was privately telling confidants that, actually, he’d met with Biden and Biden seemed “fine.” Perhaps this book should have been about Donald Trump, for the second presidential election in a row, grotesquely lying about the physical and mental health of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, and worse still doing so at a time he was lying to a historic degree about his own health?
(8) Almost none of the book is even about what it says it’s about. This book isn’t at all supposed to be about how little time Kamala Harris had to run a campaign—107 days, as we’re told over and over and over again—because of course in a normal election cycle the time between the Democratic National Convention and Election Day is very often less than that, making the length of the Harris campaign a categorical non-issue. For instance, after Biden won an open Democratic primary in 2020, do you know how many days his general election campaign was? 75 days. So the idea that Harris, who had a robust political operation around her from mid-2023 on—because she was on the Democratic ticket, and was running on the same ticket as Biden—couldn’t have run a good campaign in 107 days is abject nonsense. Indeed, the surprise twist Tapper hides from his reader is that throughout the 2024 presidential campaign the general sense among Democrats (including this author) is that Harris was running the best campaign of her political career, a campaign to be proud of.
Indeed, in Biden insisting that Harris get the 2024 nod instead of Democrats holding a circular-firing-squad “blitz” primary in July—if you can believe it, Tapper chastises Biden for putting the kibosh on that obvious disaster-in-the-making—President Biden was ensuring that Democrats would get a candidate who had already been running for the White House for a year, indeed on the same ticket as him, and therefore already had a formidable campaign operation, didn’t need to reintroduce herself to the public, and could credibly carry the mantle for the Biden administration. Though Tapper seems to be unaware of it, there was, in fact, lingering bitterness in the Democratic Party over how Bernie Sanders was treated by the DNC in 2016, so Biden knew in 2024—even if Tapper doesn’t now—that it was essential for avid Biden fans, of which were tens of millions in America in 2024, to not feel like an all-new cohort of anti-Biden-Harris candidates was being wheeled out by the DNC at the final moment. Tapper, who as a political reporter and analyst should know better, gives no indication that he understands Biden was taking all this into account in tapping his running mate for the POTUS nom rather than greenlighting another 2016-like DNC-bigfooting fiasco. Of course, crediting Biden with shrewdness would damage the book’s thesis gravely.
In other words, readers will be shocked to learn that much of this book is not about Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities, but other matters the framing and facts and response to which would and should be entirely different. For instance, how can Tapper switch to talking about Joe Biden’s physical fitness without noting that Biden was fitter than Trump and, unlike Trump, had no history of hiding and/or doctoring and/or rigging his medical records? How can Tapper switch to focusing on Biden’s popularity as a candidate without noting repeatedly that Trump’s popularity was even worse—which is of course exactly the data-point that Team Biden was considering in deciding what to make of Biden’s own popularity in 2024? How can Tapper float a raft of candidates he pretends would’ve been sure to win (Gretchen Whitmer, Pete Buttigieg, J.B. Pritzker, Raphael Warnock, Amy Klobuchar) when future historians will record that Trump’s main enduring appeal was to Christian white-male grievance and the candidates Tapper is now pushing ex post are, respectively, a woman, a gay man, a Jewish man, a Black man, and yet another woman? Are we to whitewash out of all coherence the unique circumstances that a diverse, women’s rights-oriented political party (the Democrats) were facing in 2024, namely that America had, for its own sick reasons, decided that only white men deserve to be POTUS? Is Joe Biden not to be credited for seeing this in real time, as much as it certainly pained him (and many of us, too) to discover it?
(9) To his credit—and discredit—Tapper repeatedly prefaces information by saying that it’s speculation, or offers ex post clarifications that certain Biden actions could be interpreted in benign or non-benign ways. It’s to Tapper’s “credit” because candor in this regard is better than the alternative, but it’s to his discredit because it begs the question: why write this book at all if you are going to offer virtually no fresh hard evidence in support of your book’s thesis, only innuendo and ambiguous scenes? Keep in mind that Tapper isn’t a curatorial journalist, so the implicit and explicit boast with his book, one we receive in its very first chapter, is that everything he’s writing comes to him from human sources. That’s fine and good—conventional reportage is a critical component of contemporary journalism—but what’s an author to do when he’s under contract to write a book but none of his human sources appear to be able to establish Biden as experiencing cognitive devolution out of keeping with his baseline conduct across fifty years in politics?
Certainly, in Biden moving from a relatively cushy job (as a veteran Delaware senator) to the hardest job on Earth, President of the United States, we would not be at all surprised to find him frequently exhausted, and to exhibit all the signs, both physical and otherwise, that accompany exhaustion; yet where is the evidence in this book that anyone who spoke to Tapper felt Biden was experiencing more than mere exhaustion?
In fact, the only neutral sources Tapper quotes appears to be nonpartisan staffers who very much believed Biden was suffering from exhaustion rather than cognitive decline.
This leaves Tapper “seeking for a presence in absences”—for instance, by suggesting, without evidence, that Biden’s doctor’s choice to not to give him regular cognitive exams must be explainable by an awareness that Biden would fail those tests. But there’s no evidence for this beyond Tapper’s (and his publisher’s) fever dream on this score. Yet we get regaled with the fever dream, and many more of a similar character, nonetheless.
(10) Tapper’s book’s main conceit seems to be an attempt to get readers to dislike Joe Biden so that we’ll be willing to believe anything about him—yet another sign that the book is actually simply intended for people who already dislike Biden. Why are we told that the morning after the election, Biden awoke feeling he could have beaten Trump? He likely couldn’t have, but this sort of self-aggrandizing egotism is literally ubiquitous among the class of people who think they should be President of the United States. Tapper wants us to know this trivia not because it actually matters, not because it’s historically exceptional, but to ensure we feel disgust toward Biden.
In short, we’re being slow-conned.
By the same token, Tapper makes sure we’re taken through the process of visualizing Biden’s daily frailty without noting that America is a country that—Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy excepted—almost always elects old men as president. Ronald Reagan suffered from dementia for much of his second term; Trump suffers from obvious mental and emotional defects, from sociopathy to malignant narcissism, and has for years (ailments that only worsened as he joined Biden—Tapper doesn’t focus on this, of course—as one of the oldest presidential candidates in American history); George H.W. Bush was “only” 68 when he ran for reelection in 1992, but life expectancy in the United States was 75.5 at the time (it’s four full years longer now) and there’s a reason Saturday Night Live spent that whole election cycle depicting Bush as old, out-of-touch, unable to form complete sentences, and vaguely detached from reality; after Bush Sr. lost in 1992, the Republican Party decided to go with an even older candidate in 1996, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, who was 73 when he ran—just 36 months from a normative death—and faced jokes about his old age every single day of his campaign.
In other words, Tapper’s book plays off Americans’ increasingly tunnel-visioned understanding of their own history by portraying Biden’s circumstances as unique when, in fact, they weren’t particularly so if even if one only considers—as I’ve just done here—only the last thirty years or so of U.S. political history. Just so, “He [Biden] saw himself as a man of historic achievements [in the presidency],” Tapper tells us, making sure not to add that nonpartisan historians agree with him. Again, the point is to needle readers into seeing Biden as a man full of hubris and folly while stripping him of any veneer of competence. The book’s thesis demands this be so. In a similar vein, a Biden Family philosophy of avoiding meanness to others even in instances in which meanness could reveal something accurate about a rival is interpreted by Tapper as a mandate to “ignore ugly facts.” See how he’s teeing his own thesis up?
(11) The supposed “coverup” is quickly revealed to be… well, not that. Tapper and his publisher have been at great pains to validate far-right conspiracy theories, as they know that the only reliable audience for a hitjob like this are far-right consumers—who aren’t generally big readers unless it’s about a conspiracy theory that coddles their sense of themselves as prescient. But in fact, early on in the book, Tapper’s sources—even as it’s being clear that they feel a venomous hatred for Team Biden—freely acknowledge that that team almost certainly “wasn’t being intentionally deceitful.”
Indeed, the big early reveal in the book is that not only are theories of a conspiracy unfounded, but that the reality is at once much sadder and more ennobling: those closest to Biden were such believers in his political abilities—having just witnessed him strongarm from the jaws of the almost impossibly polarized Trump Era a string of political victories comprising what nonpartisan historians were then calling the fourteenth-best American presidency in the history of the country—that they may well have deceived themselves about what Joe Biden was capable of in a second term.
(12) Tapper is playing an incredibly deceitful semantic game. With Original Sin, you may think you’re reading a book about whether Biden was fit to be POTUS in 2023 and 2024—because Trump told us Biden wasn’t, and Tapper and his publisher cleverly imply, now, that Team Trump was wholly correct—but in fact, this is a book on a very different topic: the entirely speculative question of whether Biden could have been an effective president in… 2027.
What?
2027?
Yes.
The main point this book is making is that while Biden was perfectly competent to be president during his first term—his schedule simply had to be compressed so as not to overwork him (true for all presidents) and there were days he wasn’t as sharp as on others due to the inability of his aides to avoid overworking him (also true of nearly all presidents)—there were questions among some in his orbit about how he would be performing well into a second term.
That’s unknowable, of course.
So why does Tapper tap-dance around the fact that this is really the question that he’s looking at? Why does he hide that the questions raised internally about Biden during the 2024 campaign were mostly about what Biden would be like in 2027, not as much about whether he could beat Trump in 2024? (Remember that Biden’s team did not, internally, doubt that his June 2024 debate performance was caused by a post-foreign trip exhaustion.) The answer seems simple enough: if Tapper admitted that his book is most focused not on whether Biden was fully equipped to be a great president in his first term—the issue Trump supporters almost exclusively focus on now, calling it a political “scandal” considerably worse than Watergate—but rather whether Biden would have been able to be a competent president in 2026 or 2027, he’d have to admit that the historical precedent Biden was working from was Republican Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was old when he ran for reelection in 1984, yet won that year in one of the biggest landslides in American political history in part because he had a historically weak opponent (something that also, post-January 6, would have been said of Trump). Reagan then spent much of his second term in obvious decline. The Reagan example not only defuses the fact it is now Republicans alleging an “unprecedented” cover-up, but also explains why Team Biden was really only looking at whether Biden could win in 2024—because unlike Team Reagan, they almost certainly envisioned him stepping down and letting Kamala Harris take over before President Biden ceased to be able to do his job, something Reagan and the Republican Party refused to do in recent memory.
That reality would not have played well among Tapper’s target audience, however.
(13) The book is a historic nothing-burger. Consider these two revelatory sentences:
Fix up the syntax a bit, reversing the purely rhetorical negative figurations, and what you get from the above is this assertion: even on the last day of his presidential term, a rested and prepared Joe Biden—whose team was charged, as every presidential advisory corps is, with making sure the president was always rested and prepared—was just fine cognitively and making sound decisions. Sort of takes the wind out of the book’s sails, doesn’t it? Implying that only when not rested and not prepared was there a chance of a POTUS making less than sound decisions?
Of which American president couldn’t this be said? Any of them, going back to 1776?
Actually, I can think of one.
The man Joe Biden ran against in 2024.,
The man who Jake Tapper decided not to write a book about: Donald Trump.
As the first obviously mentally unwell person to ascend to the presidency, Donald Trump was also the first president to fail to meet the test Tapper outlines above. Even a rested Trump was never prepared for his job, we now know from countless books about his first term—including those in the Proof Series—because of his borderline illiteracy, ADHD, pathological narcissism and clinically cognizable vanity prompting him to (a) refuse to read briefs, (b) listen to briefings, or (c) prepare for anything. Worse still, in his first term Trump was such a narcissistic sociopath that he couldn’t or wouldn’t be talked out of any of his preposterous beliefs, even demonstrably false ones, even by top experts in the fields in question. Trump believed, well-rested and/or otherwise, that he knew everything about everything—even subjects he had no experience with whatsoever. But instead of writing a book about Joe Biden’s 2024 opponent, who we know from thousands of public and private accounts (and simply from all of us being alive from 2015 through 2021) couldn’t make sound decisions, whether he was rested or unrested or prepared or unprepared, due to endemic psychological and emotional conditions that operated as terminal personality defects, we find ourselves with a new book about a president who… did well when rested and prepared. See the problem?
(14) Even the. book’s “worst” revelations are blown out of proportion to a degree that is almost comical. Giving what purports to be a full list of the issues with Biden’s competence, Tapper opines that starting midway through his presidency—i.e., long after Trump began falsely claiming that Biden was suffering from dementia—(i) Biden would sometimes “speak so softly that he couldn’t be understood” (a political and rhetorical issue, not one of cognition), (ii) he would occasionally “los[e] his train of thought” (absolutely common among people of any age who work in high-stress jobs with no down-time, and not a sign of cognitive impairment lest every one of us, this author included, be deemed cognitively impaired), and (iii) could arguably “sometimes seem incoherent” (note the heavy lifting done by the words “seem” and “sometimes” here, as that three-word phrase could be applied to many politicians, including top Trump allies during their routinely incoherent Newsmax, OAN, and FNC interviews).
Even if we put aside the fact that Biden was at the time running against the American politician with the most categorically incoherent standard stump speech America has ever seen—one that involves sharks and windmills and sudden electrocution and toilets that flush too slow and low-pressure shower heads and trophy wives and lots of made-up stories of “big strong men” inexplicably crying and calling him “sir” over and over and over)—the only item in Tapper’s list that would cause us concern would be (iv) that Joe Biden allegedly had “moments where he could not recall the names of top aides whom he sees every day.” This last item is the only one here that’s particularly unusual, which is probably why Tapper doesn’t tell us how many times it happened, which aides were involved (so we can assess for ourselves whether they were actually prominent figures in Biden’s massive corps of advisers and underlings), and whether these sudden struggles were all tied, as the evidence we have suggests they were, to moments in which the then-president was jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, overwhelmed by visitors or well-wishers at a frenetic public event, or in some other situation in which a sudden brain fart is likely among even the best of us.
(15) The book constantly contradicts itself, and seems to know that it’s doing so. Mere pages after we’re told that Obama, with a harshly critical eye, determined Biden was “fine” as of June 2023, Tapper assures us that as of a year later—June 2024—Biden had in fact been experiencing a “capability diminishment” for “years.” Indeed, just the page before the Obama revelation, Tapper had suggested that any issues Biden had had first arisen in 2022, meaning that (even if this were true) his June debate was possibly under 24 months (not “years”) from the onset of a “capability diminishment.”
To evade detection for, or recrimination over, these repeated slippages in his timeline, Tapper uses vague formulations. Consider, for example, “capability diminishment.” Do you know what Tapper appears to actually be discussing here? The fact that in the latter half of his first term in office Biden’s team saw that the schedule he was setting for himself was overworking him to the point of exhaustion, so they reduced his hours of daily operation as best they could—getting rid of unnecessary staff meetings and redundant briefings to keep Biden (see supra) both well-rested and well-prepared.
Because the resulting daily schedule was shorter, Tapper gets to treat all of this wise schedule-planning as “capability diminishment.” Of course, he wants you to think that he’s speaking of Biden’s cognitive abilities rather than his physical exhaustion. But at least in 2022 and 2023, it doesn’t appear that Tapper is speaking of cognitive abilities.
The result of this game of temporal three-card monte is that at one point Tapper says Biden was visibly “declining” in 2020—which means it would have been clear in a presidential race that saw precisely no one anywhere report signs of such a decline—even as, just two sentences later, Tapper quotes a source who says the decline began… in 2023.
How are readers supposed to make sense of these contradictions, if the author himself isn’t even trying to?
And he really isn’t. In fact, mere sentences after the “2023” date we find Tapper dating Biden’s decline to… 2019.
Yes—that’s how sloppy this book is.
But it gets worse.
A paragraph or two later we find Tapper announcing that the “decline” actually began “in 2015”? That’s right, Tapper is so keen to please far-right conspiracy theorists that he even leaves the impression Biden might not have been competent as vice president.
It’s hard to deny, in view of all this, that this book isn’t just morally grotesque but, far more importantly, consistently counterfactual.
And it gets worse than even this. If you can believe it, a mere two sentences after the “2015” claim, Tapper quotes a source claiming that Biden’s “brain and mental capacity…dissolved” at least “six to nine months before” his son Beau died in May 2015—which would place Biden’s decline all the way back in Fall 2014.
That’s almost a full decade before the June 2024 presidential debate. See how ridiculous all this is?
(16) Tapper appears to deliberately miss the point of his own research—for cash. Early on, Tapper makes sure his readers aren’t inclined to believe Team Biden claims that in June 2024 what Biden was experiencing just before the presidential debate was exhaustion following a foreign trip whose agenda (as many major media reports said at the time and Proof reported) would have exhausted a much younger man. Yet the first time Tapper sets out to prove that Biden has been declining for years, he speaks of a December 2019 whirlwind pre-caucus tour of Iowa that featured… you guessed it, an agenda that would have exhausted a much younger man.
An honest author would take from this story that Team Biden realized, early on, for reasons that had nothing to do with the candidate’s age or any cognitive decline, that he needed his rest; he was just one of those people who doesn’t perform well without it now that he’s advanced in years. An honest author would use this anecdote to explain why Biden aides believed, years later, that it was (a) reasonable to limit Biden’s daily schedule as president, and (b) think that he could perform admirably within a carefully controlled presidential campaign schedule in 2024.
Instead, Tapper misses the point he himself is making entirely, choosing to view the 2019 Iowa anecdote as a sign of random cognitive decline rather than a simple cause-and-effect.
Why do this? Because big books sales—and big bucks—lie in the former direction.
Tapper’s Original Sin
No single report can unpack all the badness in this book—all the infelicities, whether journalistic or ethical—but an important last item, one that helps summarize why this book in its current form should never have existed at all, is that the “but for” cause of its publication was a June 2024 debate that the authors of Original Sin insist was quite representative of Biden’s communication skills from 2021 through 2025 when in fact it was demonstrably and provably not.
As Proof reported on exhaustively at the time, we know—and we know exactly—why Biden under-performed at the presidential debate in late June of 2024. We even know why he was somewhat off at that now-infamous fundraiser at which he didn’t right away recognize George Clooney, as that event occurred during the exact same narrow window of time that the aforementioned debate occurred.
And more importantly, the authors of Original Sin know all this as well. They know that media colleagues they respect reported that Biden took a lengthy overseas trip just before the debate and fundraiser, and that during his trip he both got sick and pushed himself harder than he should have—or than any of his aides wanted him to.
It was widely said at the time, by journalists Jake Tapper respects, that Biden pushed himself harder than even a much younger POTUS would have pushed himself, did it against not just aides’ but medical advice, and did it at a time his team had developed for him a reasonable daily schedule that fit his age and his physical health. Everyone on Team Biden knew what the consequences of Biden ignoring that advice would be, and the whole nation saw those consequences at the debate (and Clooney saw them at the fundraiser). Biden’s team also knew that they couldn’t convince Biden to do anything differently overseas, because his response would have been predictably Bidenesque: I’m working for the people, and I’m going to work just as hard for the people as I can.
So he did.
And in so doing, he lost his political career—and a good deal of his reputation.
Tapper is helping see to the latter.
But the fact remains, and it’s one that Tapper occasionally acknowledges even in the pages of Original Sin, that there were many times during the Biden administration when the man showed amazing fortitude of both a physical and cognitive nature. He was, for almost his entire term, in far better physical condition than Trump, though by the very end of his term the two were likely neck-and-neck in that respect. But he also once did a two-hour-long presser—unprecedented in modern American political history—to show that he didn’t just have physical stamina, but mental stamina as well. That presser was generally seen as excellent, and to the extent anyone on Biden’s team was unhappy with it, it was mostly for the usual reason: too much of Biden speaking means too many gaffes his political opponents can harp on (though those gaffes had nothing at all to do with any cognition issues).
By the same token, American voters could see how Biden performed even the night of the debate—after he’d taken some cough medicine—as he had a televised rally that evening at which he sounded much better than he had during the debate. And they could watch, of course, all Biden’s subsequent pressers and interviews, which may have been less frequent than Trump’s (due to Biden’s reasonable philosophy regarding a president’s proper and conventional role in American life, namely that it should be modest rather than intrusive) and may not have been as fluid as Biden’s 2010s pressers and interviews were, but certainly would have reassured any listener that the POTUS didn’t sound like he had in Atlanta.
He just didn’t. And Tapper knows that.
Yet during his profoundly disingenuous book tour, he’s treated the Atlanta debate as his Rock of Gibraltar—pretending that every Biden sin not only flows from that night but was revealed in that night, and that that night can be seen as the touchstone for everything one could ever have said about President Biden before and after Atlanta.
Thus, we recently saw Tapper telling Stephen A. Smith that it was “Biden’s condition [as seen in Atlanta]” that the Biden Team had been “covering up” in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025… though he couldn’t point to even a single public event at which Biden struggled even half as much as he had in Atlanta. Why? Because Atlanta was a one-off, a Tapper’s colleagues (and Proof) reported at the time. But Tapper revealing what he knows was reported about the reasons behind the Atlanta performance would call into question his book’s thesis, which is that Biden was consistently Atlanta-like for years and years and his team covered it up. But he has no evidence for this claim, which is why the Atlanta debate is treated as revelatory and representative rather than idiosyncratic and reporting from long ago by more talented colleagues in corporate media, all of which contradicts his book, must be summarily ignored out of necessity.
This, then, is Tapper’s “original sin.” He knew how outraged Republicans and even some Democrats were over the Atlanta debate, so he quickly set about trying to convince the country that what it had seen in Atlanta was illustrative of everything that was happening behind the scenes at the White House—though it wasn’t, he knew it wasn’t, all the available human sources being tapped by corporate media at the time said it wasn’t, and in fact Tapper’s thesis was merely designed to make a certain class of reader feel good about themselves.
An unfortunate but sadly immutable fact is that people like being told that an event that shook them was broadly important; people like being told that it only took them watching five or ten minutes of an event to properly understand a much, much longer sequence of events (e.g., an entire presidential administration); people like it if a once-serious journalist tells them the wild conspiracy theories that their least likeable and responsible friends and neighbors have been spreading are true; and people like the idea of a powerful person who has been in government for decades being a physical manifestation of the rot and deception so many of us feel Washington is rife with. In short, Tapper knew the Atlanta debate could make him rich, and he was right about that.
As for everything else, he was wrong. And there’s every indication that he knew that he was wrong but just couldn’t help himself. There was too much money on the table for ethical considerations to win out. And surely he had colleagues and editors and well-wishers and friends and publishers and publicists and agents assuring him that he was “fighting the good fight,” and that it was just a coincidence that the good fight would also make him filthy rich to a degree he’d never previously dreamed of… and at a time when the most lucrative mass communications are pretty consistently disinformation.
Again, all these people were right—as Original Sin is now the top-selling book in the United States. It’s selling hundreds of thousands of copies as I publish this report on how deceitful it is.
Exponentially more readers will see the lies of Original Sin than will see this review.
Conclusion
Jake Tapper missed his chance to write an actually revelatory book. One interesting part of Original Sin, if not one that directly advances its thesis, is its recitation of several attempts by the Biden Family in 2013 to hide Beau Biden’s cancer diagnosis—including from the then-politician’s constituents. This is certainly a problem across all of American politics today, and going back decades and decades (think of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, for instance, or FDR and his wheelchair): politicians, and not just Jed Bartlet on The West Wing, don’t default to exhibiting candor with constituents. Not about their health, and not about anything.
Arguably, the nation was primed for Donald Trump to become a political figure by precisely this age-old American tradition. We almost expect our politicians to lie to us because there are so many high-profile instances, going back not just decades but centuries, of our leaders doing precisely that. Just as Ulysses S. Grant was for decades and decades considered a “bad” president because historians blamed him for not being willing to excise corrupt officials from within his cadre of political intimates, we as a nation have been discussing since almost the founding of our Republic the propensity of our politicians to insulate themselves and their advisers from reality and public view in unhealthy ways.
We can certain see, in Original Sin, evidence of this as well. Like the Clintons, like the Bushes, like the Reagans, like the Trumps, like the Kennedys, like President Lyndon Johnson, like Nixon, like more or less every successful politician America has ever had, a certain artificial insularity is in evidence within that political camp that at once (a) helped ensure the candidate’s ascent and (b) eventually helped ensure their downfall.
Now that’s an interesting book. And thesis. But it’s not this book, or this book’s thesis.
That book wouldn’t sell, as it wouldn’t have a single natural reading constituency like Tapper’s hitjob on a recent Democratic leader did and still does. A book underscoring that situations like Biden’s in 2024 are actually roughly inevitable in American politics—for reasons not particular to Biden—wouldn’t eliminate the widely known context that invisibly dances in the margins of every page of Original Sin in order to tell a story Trump’s largely undereducated and historically illiterate constituency can follow.
No wonder Tapper frames Team Biden celebrating his 2020 primary win as at least in part a validation of their campaign strategy as a sign of Greek-tragedy levels of hubris rather than… well, what every campaign ever has thought about itself while basking in the glow of a victory. Tapper needs to frame the Biden story as unique rather than sadly typical. (Indeed, the only recent exception to a major-party political team viewing a national victory as a confirmation of its internal candidate-handling strategies would be 2016; in that year, Biden’s 2024 opponent—Trump—infamously didn’t expect to win, and thus would have been painfully aware, post-election, that it was only Russian election interference that had turned the tide in his favor, rather than any strategy he or his aides had knowingly employed in October 2016, when the Access Hollywood Tape and Trump’s clearly mentally sick predations were all anyone was talking about.)
For all of the foregoing, it is important to admit that—candidly—Joe Biden has never been a good communicator. He often stutters; he likes to change the direction of his sentences in midstream; he frequently goes off-topic; he embellishes; he tells aimless stories; he repeats certain words and phrases long after they’ve lost rhetorical utility; he inadvertently reveals certain cultural insensitivities, from merely being an out-of-touch elderly man to what we might plausibly term political incorrectness; he’s prone to what the kids call “cringe”; he’s too stubborn to take good advice about how he could switch things up; he’s been caught plagiarizing in the past; and because of his lifelong stutter, he sometimes speaks too slowly or softly and has to quickly transition out of certain utterances if he senses they’re going to be physically problematic for him.
Joe Biden’s appeal politically—which candidly on the campaign trail is limited, which is why he lost national primaries in both 1988 and 2008—is all about (a) the sense people have that he’s a decent man, which up until recently was something that mattered in U.S. politics *and therefore something his team had reason to deem an asset no matter how bad a campaigner Biden was and is), and (b) the concurrent sense voters have that once in office he’s not just a congenial man but also an extremely competent leader.
By early 2024, Biden had proven himself to he one of the better presidents of the last hundred years. Inarguably. It’s historical fact, per… well… historians, actually. And he certainly hadn’t become a less sympathetic figure in the eyes of most Americans, given the diagnosis his son Beau received in 2014, his heavily memed “bromance” with Obama in 2015, his decision to step aside to let Clinton get the Democratic nom in 2016, his relative magnanimity over Trump’s early conduct in 2017, the centrist and uniting presidential campaign he began running in late 2018 and early 2019, and the way tried to bring America together after the horrifying events of 2020 (the pandemic) and 2021 (January 6). It was reasonable for Biden’s team to feel that his two strengths as a politician had been born out by early 2024, and, more than this, to feel that they had long been unfairly doubted by people—like, candidly Obama and Clinton—whose doubts were proven wrong after Biden’s victory against Trump in November of 2020.
The story of how the Biden Family, wracked by car accident and cancer and addiction and political boxing matches for decades, aided by a loyalist cadre with few believers outside it, could come to 2024 unable to fully hear their critics is an extremely relatable one. But you know what book title wouldn’t have made Jake Tapper rich? An Extremely Relatable Story. So instead we got the preposterously over-the-top title Original Sin, which explicitly compares the actions of the Biden Family to the work of Satan in the Garden of Eden and the subsequent reelection of Donald Trump to the fall of Man that Satan’s work enabled.
The histrionics of all this would be pathetic if they weren’t, foreseeably, disgustingly lucrative. In an America in which everything seems broken—from our courts to our politics to our tech sector to our campaign financing to our healthcare system to our foreign alliances to our separation of powers to even, dare we say it, our very soul as a nation—perhaps it ought little surprise us how splendidly Original Sin confirms that not only is our journalism also broken but so too is the trade publishing sector. It’s no longer possible to do anything about Jake Tapper becoming extremely rich off a series of vile lies, but we can certainly decide going forward whether to ever credit his word again.
Much needed scathing review and done as only you could do it. Jake Tapper didn't miss his chance to write an actually revelatory book. Jake Tapper is incapable of doing so. To paraphrase Obama, Jake Tapper left journalism to go to CNN because journalism is hard and rarely puts one in the spot light. Jake Tapper is a light weight who craves attention. Who better to write this piece of shit book?
Thank you for this summary. You confirmed my impression of the book and why I would never read it. I found the premise of Tapper’s book difficult to swallow. I follow politics, watched Biden and Trump. There was no comparison between the two men - Biden was/is more fit emotionally, physically, and mentally than Trump. His biggest fault - being an introvert, able to do what was necessary, but not a showman, entertainer: he did not need to be the center of attention. Nope, a mone grab. I am disappointed in Jake Tapper.