President Joe Biden’s last two years in office were marked by his deteriorating health.
A new book says the president‘s closest advisers, staffers and family members actively covered up his health issues amid questions and concerns about Biden not looking like himself during his reelection campaign.
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson interviewed more than 200 people, mostly Democratic operatives, for the book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
Conservatives feel vindicated by Tapper and Thompson’s reporting about Biden’s declining health after being gaslit by the White House and mainstream media, who claimed Biden was doing OK. Tapper and Thompson have also received criticism for their reporting before the election.
‘Original Sin’ authors under fire
The problems went beyond Biden’s slowed speech. According to the latest book by two veteran White House reporters, “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk— had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until “after the election.”
The president‘s physician said a wheelchair could become necessary if Biden fell again. He had tripped over a sandbag at the Air Force Academy in June 2023, as Axios reported.
The book details many other instances of Biden’s decline, like one scene where Biden fails to recognize George Clooney, his friend of 15 years.
Were Tapper and Thompson part of the problem?
Fox News published a report taking aim at the two authors and arguing that Tapper and Thompson were a part of the cover-up.
The report strung together comments Tapper made in defense of Biden. In 2020, the CNN anchor took a page out of the White House’s handbook and pushed against Lara Trump’s attacks on the president‘s cognitive health.
“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper said to Lara Trump on his show. “I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.”
Lara Trump, President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, claimed she didn’t know Biden struggled with a stutter all his life.
Two years later, Tapper did bring up the subject of Biden’s age while interviewing him.
“What‘s your message to Democrats who like you, who like what you’ve done but are concerned about your age and the demands of the job?” he asked. Biden responded by talking about burn pit compensation to veterans and finished his thought with some assistance from Tapper.
Biden said, “We’ve had, you know, dealing with, you know, making sure that veterans get compensated for the, for-”
“Burn pits,” Tapper said.
Tapper and Thompson admit they could have done more
Tapper acknowledged his shortcomings in his day-to-day reporting on the White House.
“Well, Alex Thompson and I were on the case, as were lots of other reporters trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes,” he said on CNN.
“But the bottom line is the White House was lying, not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own Cabinet, they were lying to White House staffers, they were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors about how bad things had gotten.”
Tapper and Thompson have hired a crisis PR firm, Heller Co., led by Risa Heller, to navigate the book’s release and roll out, as Breaker Media, co-written by former Daily Beast reporter Lachlan Cartwright, reported.
CNN defended Tapper, saying he covered “the Clooney op-ed, the Hur report, and Biden physical limitations” on his show. As did Thompson, who in a post on X wrote, “The truth is both Jake and I were covering this.”
At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in late April, Thompson received the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House coverage.
“Being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves,” he said in his acceptance speech, as the Deseret News reported. “We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.”
Thompson, a reporter for Axios, was largely chosen for the award because of his reporting on Biden’s health, and his disastrous debate performance against Trump last summer.
“President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” he said.