He Really Was Senile

1,917 words

Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up & His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
New York: Penguin Press, 2025

Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died. His eyes were not dim nor his natural vigor diminished. Deuteronomy 34:7

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10

Once a man gets to his late seventies, he can easily suffer an irreversible and catastrophic health decline—often cognitive. One such nosedive took place in front of the eyes of the world, that of the 46th President of the United States, Joseph Biden. Biden’s cognitive decline and increasing frailty was obvious and a contributing factor to the Russian attack on Ukraine. While Biden’s impairment was noticeable, it was ignored and denied by a considerable portion of the mainstream media, Biden’s staff, and large swaths of the Democratic Party. How this collective groupthink took hold of the most experienced political operatives is the subject of Original Sin by mainstream media reporters Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.

The decline started in 2015, when then Vice President Biden’s son Beau Biden, a talented rising politician who’d served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army in Iraq, died of a brain tumor. President Biden believed the tumor was due to his son’s exposure to toxins while in Iraq, which is highly possible. Insiders stated that Biden’s grief over the loss of his son accelerated his aging. The Biden family’s decision to deny the existence of Beau’s serious fight with cancer from the public until the final stages was a foreshadowing for how Biden’s family and close associates would hide his senility as president.

The cover up was part of a family ethos to not cruelly state ugly truths—don’t call a kid who is overweigh “fat,” for example. It also comes from Biden’s professional history of “getting up” after a major failure and going on to succeed in a big way. Throughout Biden’s political rise he got up after humiliating defeats, tragic personal losses, and dreadful health setbacks. All extremely successful people have said that continuing on after a calamity was critical. Biden’s close aides had watched him get knocked down and come back again and again. These close aides were Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and the policy wonk Bruce Reed. They’d worked for Biden for decades. Two other important aides were Anita Dunn and her husband, Bob Bauer. These critical staffers came to be called the Politburo.

Biden was never an extremist politician. For the most part he went along with the flow. As one of the two US Senators for the State of Delaware, Biden put an end to the busing schemes of the “civil rights” agitators, and he was a major contributor to President Clinton’s crime bill that reduced a decades long crime wave in the middle 1990s. During that decade one could be a tough-on-crime social liberal. Biden did support the unjust “civil rights” order overall, however.

Throughout his political career, Biden never gave a speech which exposed an ignored great truth. As a senior senator, he did everything he could to give George W. Bush the go-ahead to attack Iraq. Throughout this time, most of what he said was bumbling and gaffe-filled. He frequently rambled and forgot names. This history is a large part of why his critical supporters failed to recognize Biden’s decline—he’d never been eloquent in the first place.

Biden was able to use the sub-Saharan black political machine in the Democratic Party to defeat his progressive rival Bernie Sanders in the primary. During the 2020 election, his age and frailty might have been further exposed, but he was able to campaign from his home in Wilmington due to the COVID pandemic. He won the election—I believe due to fraud—and took office in front of an empty field in a city under military occupation.

Tapper and Thompson write:

. . . [T]he election results were closer than the Biden team expected. Biden earned seven million more votes but only won the Electoral College due to a margin of about forty-three thousand votes across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—fewer than Trump had secured in his Electoral College victory in 2016. In the House of Representatives, Democrats lost seats, and the Senate majority was still undecided. Despite those thin margins and mixed results for Democrats, Biden and the Politburo took the outcome as more reason to have faith in the Biden theology. Biden’s age had been a top concern among voters, and he won anyway. (pp. 26/7)

The first inkling of trouble caused by Biden’s cognitive decline on the public’s business happened shortly after he was sworn in. He gathered Democratic lawmakers together to organize them to push for his Build Back Better plan, but his speech was incoherent. Lawmakers later said words to the effect that “he didn’t ask for anything.”

Then Kabul fell to the Taliban in August of 2021. The American withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled in the worst possible way. Tapper and Thompson don’t dwell on this catastrophe in depth, only pointing out that Biden curiously didn’t fire anyone afterwards and Biden’s poll ratings tanked, never again going above the thirties in percentage.

Shortly after the disaster in Afghanistan, the culture of the White House started to shift towards “cover up.” Jill Biden led an effort to shield her husband’s cognitive issues from exposure. Her top aides bullied ordinary staffers into silence, and soon she was calling many of the shots. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, the surviving son of the President who made very poor personal and professional choices and thus was fodder for the tabloids, continued to spiral wildly. Biden’s daughter also struggled with addiction. These indiscretions put enormous pressure on the President and provided ammunition for his political enemies.

Biden could have stepped aside gracefully after the 2022 mid-terms, but the expected Republican wave turned into a ripple. Biden interpreted the election as the public’s endorsement of his presidency and he, and his inner circle Politburo, shifted focus towards running again. However, the red ripple was not really an endorsement of Biden. The Republicans didn’t have much of a message, and a considerable number of voters were angry that the Roe decision had been overturned by the Supreme Court.

Events outside the bubble in the White House continued to unravel. Biden’s border was an uncontrolled nightmare. Colorado Democratic Senator Michael Bennett watched Biden have something like a neurological episode at an immigration event. Biden seemed to “glitch.” Tapper and Thompson write:

[. . . ] Bennet considered what Biden’s age likely meant when it came to the issue of immigration. He’d never felt as if the White House had a coherent policy. It seemed like there were two competing sides of the debate within the administration—one pushing for tougher border regulations, another opening the country to new immigrants without any real process—but no one had publicly articulated the president’s view on the matter. In early June, Biden had instituted an effective ban on asylum re-quests from undocumented immigrants who crossed the US-Mexico border, putting them on a fast track to deportation. But here they were two weeks later, Biden signing off on a policy to allow the undocumented family members of US citizens who’d lived in the United States for a decade or more to file paperwork for legal status. Bennet had come to believe that Biden’s inability to mediate between the people in his administration with different political viewpoints had led to an incoherent overall position on the issue. (pp. 180–81)

Biden also suffered several very public falls. He tripped climbing the stairs of Air Force One and collapsed while riding a bike in Delaware. In the summer of 2023, Biden tripped over a sandbag on a podium at the Air Force Academy. The sandbag incident caused Biden’s staff to carefully stage-manage his appearances and have his speeches distributed through pre-recorded video releases that were filmed with several cameras so there could be a jump cut that hid his incoherent phrases and glitchy pauses. As Biden’s presidency continued, more editing was needed, and Hollywood super-directors were called in to help.

Events further from the border were also increasingly dire. In response to a raid by Hamas, Israel responded with a massive, genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza that split the Progressive wing of Biden’s Party. Biden should have been out front dealing with the issues, but his administration seemed out of control. Nonetheless, he did decide to run again, and he won the Democratic Party’s primary—quickly beating his most potent challenger Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Democrats should have carried out a primary over the wishes of the Biden faction, but nobody wanted to make the first move. This was because the White House staff still had the ability to do damage. Biden’s loyalists had successfully outmaneuvered their own Justice Department by painting a lawyer, Rober Hur, who was investigating Biden’s collection of classified documents Biden had in his garage, as a “right wing hack.” The charge stuck—Hur suffered a period of unemployment due to the White House attack. Hur’s report stated that Biden’s mental abilities were so diminished that no grand jury would believe he was operating with mens rea—an evil intent. Biden had collected the documents for future historical reference. (It seems to me that this process should be automatic and part of the respective duties of civil servants in the National Archives who would be responsible for the classified papers.)

At a commemoration of D-Day at Normandy on June 6, 2024, Biden’s age (again) was an obvious issue. He shambled, he was unable to stand at one point, and his voice was weak. Then came the debate with Donald Trump at the end of the month. Despite extensive rest and preparation, his frailty and cognitive decline was obvious. Progressive pundits turned against him. Nonetheless, Biden’s team insisted that the situation was not that bad. The polls were wrong; Biden was winning and the only one who could win. Eventually, it fell to the actor George Cloony to write an op-ed in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop out. Democrats then staged a personally painful intervention calling for him to withdraw.

As always, race was an issue. Biden had the support of the Congressional Black Caucus. Tapper and Thompson write:

Biden needs to stay in, one Black congresswoman argued before the entire caucus. If he gets out, this is going to fall on the shoulders of a Black woman. And Kamala Harris is going to lose, and everyone’s going to blame Black [sic] people.

There was a real sense from Black [sic] members that a Harris candidacy—and a devastating loss that many seemed to anticipate as a foregone conclusion—would be horrible for people of color. And yet that argument often came with the caveat that the party could not pick any replacement nominee other than Harris.

Biden did withdraw, and Kamala Harris lost as expected. Tapper and Thompson showed that the public was not wrong in recognizing that Biden was, in fact, senile. They also show that elderly politicians will be a problem going forward in the future. The issue is the enormous patronage network that surrounds a prominent elected official. Those serving in that network are young, vigorous, and ambitious. They are also loyal to a fault. Elderly politicians hiding their respective infirmities will continue in the future.