Jake Tapper describes a cover up in the movie ‘Original Sin.’

Biden’s Disappearance: “It’s Hard to Lose You, but It’s Been Wrong”

It isn’t certain when Biden’s diminishment began, except to say that signs of family turmoil were present for several years. For some, it started in earnest in 2015, with the passing of the president’s eldest son. The authors are told by a White House aide that Beau’s death wrecked him. Part of him died, but never came back after Beau died. Biden aides saw the president suddenly and steeply decline after the collapse of a deal to tax and gun charges.

Everybody got to know the first one during his vice presidency, Tapper says. The second one was much like a non- functioning Joe Biden. And that non-functioning Biden would rear his head increasingly starting in, like, 2019, 2020. And then, as his term went on, more and more behind the scenes.”

The public will see some of the things the president forgot, like the death of his son, in front of the cameras. but we had no idea how bad it was,” Tapper says.

One person told Tapper that the presidency was a five person board with the chairman being Joe Biden.

The issue became part of a broader conversation during Biden’s June 2024 debate with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Biden spoke haltingly, and struggled to articulate why he should be reelected to the office. Jake Tapper was uncertain if he would make it through all 90 minutes of the debate. A month later, Biden withdrew from the presidential race.

He regrets not being more aggressive in covering Biden’s decline. “I can point to times where I asked him this or I asked them that … but knowing what I know now, I barely scratched the surface,” he says. “I need to run more towards the discomfort of questions about health because they’re so important and they’re so under-covered in Washington.”

The office of Biden released a statement on Sunday revealing that the former president has an ” aggressive form” of prostate cancer which has spread to the bone.

“It is very sad what happens to us, if we’re lucky enough to get old. Very few of us retain our acuity until our death in our sleep at age 99,” Tapper says. It’s hard to report on this because it is the human condition. We have a right to think that a president will be sharp and on top of things.

The ways in which they helped hide his decline began innocently. I mean, any staffer wants to make a president or a senator or a governor look as good as possible. It’s understandable if he wants to do events in the middle of the day rather than early in the morning or late at night, if he wants a note card, or if he wants to use a teleprompter. But then all of those things became crutches and started really infiltrating his presidency in a serious way to the point that even cabinet meetings, even after the cameras left, were highly scripted.

The Congress went to the White House Christmas party in December 2022, but they weren’t able to see him again until December 2023.

Then I think the real part of the cover-up comes with not just the fact that he’s at 40- or 50-person fundraisers using a teleprompter, which is bizarre and unprecedented for a president who should be able to speak extemporaneously for 10 minutes. There is a fact they started cordoning off people from him. So members of Congress who went to the White House Christmas party in December 2022 didn’t see him again in the flesh, many of them, until December 2023, and they were shocked at what they saw.

It happened to me when I was reporting on the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan. This is only politics in America today. If you don’t order them, they will go after people half the time, because they have legions of people who agree with them. It’s not very different from the course. We explained the terrain that journalists were trying to report about Vice President Biden because we didn’t want to justify anything. … It is possible that the White House will call your story a lie and then threaten to ruin you if you tell the truth in public. … It also serves as a warning shot for other journalists to not follow up on a story because they see how somebody else is getting raked over the coals, and they might not want to experience that.

They were shocked. After the debate everybody was talking about, “Who’s going to say it?” Because very few people were coming forward publicly, even though the voters were clear and many members of the media were clear, a lot of Democratic officials kept quiet. … [The op-ed] had a huge impact because here’s a guy [Clooney] who co-hosted the most successful Democratic fundraiser in presidential history. A single night, thirty million dollars was raised. Here’s a beloved figure who would only make enemies. You can’t make enemies of such a thing. Most of the senators, governors and members of the House came out when he came out.

You don’t need to be a genius political consultant to know that the obvious remedy to fixing what he had just done was to go out and do 15 interviews and 20 town halls and five press conferences and just show people that he was as sharp as a tack as they had been saying. And the problem was he couldn’t do that, and that’s why his pollsters ultimately concluded there was just no way to get out of it. This was a disaster and it was going to keep getting worse and worse until election day.

The news media is in a crisis. … Reporters in general, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, all of us, people don’t trust us. The reason they don’t trust us is due to the fact that the media was late to the story about Joe Biden and his acuity. I should [say], we in the legacy media were late to that story, because conservative media was not late to it. I believe that we are in a fight for a free press. It runs the risk of not thriving, so it is not going to be taken away. We need to be as professional as possible.

What the World Saw at Biden’s 2024 Debate? Tapper and Thompson, Your Insiders, and Your Families. How Biden, His Team and His Family Pretended that Trump would be Redux

Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. They adapted it for the web.

In an authors’ note, Tapper and Thompson highlight the book’s 200 sources — lots of lawmakers and campaign and administration insiders — most of whom agreed to talk to them only after the election. Some people told us they regretted not doing more, or that they had waited so long. Many were angry and felt betrayed, not only by Biden but by his inner circle of advisers, his allies and his family. In campaign books, guilt, blame and not-my-fault-ism are standard impulses of the losing side.

These are just a few of the copious examples Tapper and Thompson report, all in advance of Biden’s halting and confused performance in his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024. Jake Tapper and Thompson write, “What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an outlier.” “It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It wasn’t someone that was a little tired.

According to the authors, a close circle of top Biden aides insisted that the president’s health was not a major problem or that he was fine. When Biden was running in 2019 and 2020, senior aides treated his age “as simply a political vulnerability, not a serious limitation on his abilities,” Tapper and Thompson write. They told themselves that even a reduced Biden would be better than a Trump redux. The authors write that Biden, his team and family allowed their self-interest and fear of a Trump presidency to justify an attempt to have an addled old man in office for four more years.