In late spring 2023, President Joe Biden made the fateful decision to stand for re-election. He saw himself as a reincarnation of Franklin D Roosevelt, a big spender who had rescued America from a post-Covid economic depression. The return of inflation seemed incidental.
More consequential in his mind was the second coming of Donald Trump. Having narrowly beaten Trump in 2020, Biden had watched in horror as the Maga hordes descended on Capitol Hill. A 36-year veteran of the US Senate, where he earned a reputation as a bit of a gasbag, Biden took the January 6 insurrection personally.
And so, casting aside doubts about his age (he would have been 86 at the end of a second term), Joseph Robinette Biden, encouraged by a cabal of self-interested advisers, concluded that he alone was capable of beating Trump and saving American democracy.
His hubristic decision and its impact on the 2024 election are the subject of three books, each admirably researched but also at times over-reliant on insiders keen to keep their noses clean. The most readable is Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, two experienced political reporters, the former a CNN news anchor. Their portrait of a decrepit American president is devastating — made more poignant following this week’s news that Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Equally compelling is evidence of a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline by his inner circle, including First Lady Jill Biden.
These advisers, dubbed “the Politburo”, wilfully misled the public and trashed anyone who dared challenge them. A case in point was special counsel Robert Hur, charged with investigating the president’s handling of classified documents. Hur described Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” — a mild verdict in retrospect but one that allowed the president to escape prosecution.
But if there was a cover-up, the media by extension were complicit. Browbeaten White House reporters too fearful of losing access. Editors unwilling to make the call about the president’s slide into senility. There were honourable exceptions. A much-criticised Wall Street Journal report in the summer of 2024 comes to mind. But too many journalists turned a blind eye, including when covering the story of the president’s wayward son, Hunter Biden.
The truth finally came out during a TV debate with Trump on June 27 2024. Biden could barely string a sentence together. It took more than three weeks before he reluctantly agreed to step aside in favour of vice-president Kamala Harris. Just 107 days remained before election day, leaving her with a mountain to climb.
“We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” said David Plouffe, the veteran Obama operative drafted into the Harris campaign. “He totally fucked us.”
Tapper and Thompson note that there is no law or oversight forcing US presidents to be transparent about their health. John F Kennedy lied about his chronic back pain caused by Addison’s disease. We still have no clue when Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s truly began. Woodrow Wilson and FDR himself went to great lengths to hide their various ailments.
The Biden case is egregious because it concerns mental infirmity. The authors are careful not to claim that his enfeebled state led to poor judgment, barring the catastrophic choice to run for re-election. Even Biden critics they spoke to “continued to the end to attest to his ability to make sound decisions, if on his own schedule”.
But politics is about communication. A presidential candidate who is incommunicado hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell. And there are real-world consequences. Biden’s inability to mount a sustained campaign for Ukraine aid cost votes in Congress. Instead, the so-called Politburo arrogantly assumed they could run the White House as a group with an addled Biden as chair.
Those fingered are Mike Donilon, a beetle-browed operative with wispy white hair whose relationship with Biden went back decades; White House counsellor Steve Ricchetti, a hard-boiled Washington lobbyist; and Bruce Reed, deputy chief of staff. Last but not least is Jill Biden, fiercely protective of her husband and family but prone to queenliness herself.
In their book, Fight, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes quote Donilon speaking to a prominent Democrat.
“Nobody walks away from this,” he says. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” (He might have added that no political operative walks away from the near $4mn package he demanded for working on the Biden re-election campaign, a sum personally approved by the president, according to Tapper and Thompson.)
Original Sin succeeds because it has a strong thesis and an arresting narrative, delivered in made-for-TV episodes. The prose is punchy and so are the quotes.
Watching yet another dud campaign video, despite the best efforts of Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, a Democratic operative comments, “This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.”
Another highlight is the Hollywood fundraiser organised by A-list actor George Clooney and movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. Biden, having flown from the G7 summit, is crippled by jet lag. He promptly fails to recognise Clooney, who has flown in specially from Italy. Former President Barack Obama puts it down to fatigue. Staff say Biden simply had an off-day.
How did it come to this? How did Joe Biden, who was supposed to mark a decisive break from Trump, end up being the bridge to Trump’s second term?
Original Sin gives a partial answer only. Democrats allowed success in the midterm elections in 2022 to go to their heads. They convinced themselves that abortion rights and blowout fiscal spending were vote winners rather than addressing rampant inflation and security on the Mexican border. They glossed over Biden’s glaring vulnerability: his age.
Bill Daley, who served as Obama’s White House chief of staff is equally scathing. In Uncharted, Chris Whipple quotes the grizzled product of Chicago’s top political family: “Everyone ignored it. And every politician, every big shot, they all bought into the attitude that if you run against him and he gets softened up and loses to Trump, you’ll be blamed and your career is over. Every freaking one of them had no balls.”
Unlike 1968, when the maverick Eugene McCarthy forced President Lyndon Johnson out of the race, Biden was virtually unchallenged in the primaries and swept to the Democratic nomination. This made it doubly hard to dislodge him when things went wrong in the summer of 2024.
In Fight, the authors open with Nancy Pelosi, who had recently stepped down as Speaker of the House of Representatives, watching the TV debate. Aghast, she resolves that Joe must go.
But the exit is excruciatingly slow. Bar Pelosi, nobody comes out well. Obama — who persuaded then vice-president Biden to make way for Hillary Clinton in 2016 — is loath to get his hands dirty. Chuck Schumer, Senate majority leader, is all hat and no cattle.
When Biden finally bows out, he gives a tepid endorsement to Kamala Harris, the former US Senator and San Francisco prosecutor whom he chose as his running mate in 2020. Allen and Parnes are good on how undercooked she is as a candidate. The low point comes when she cannot say what, if anything, she would do differently from her boss, if elected to the White House.
All vice-presidents seeking the highest office face a similar dilemma. Distance yourself too much and you face charges of disloyalty. Stay too close and you risk being labelled a patsy. Team Harris should have taken a leaf out of the George HW Bush playbook in the 1988 campaign.
Bush succeeded an immensely popular two-term Republican president, Ronald Reagan. But he deftly signalled change by talking about a “kinder, gentler” conservatism, highlighting environmental issues and the need for a new foreign policy built around “economic security” to complement national security towards the end of the cold war.
In Uncharted, Whipple gives a fuller account of the 2024 campaign by drawing on more Republican sources. Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican campaign strategist sentenced to prison for crimes related to foreign lobbying before receiving a Trump pardon, is Whipple’s go-to guy.
Some insights are valuable. Biden’s proposal for an early TV debate was a sign of desperation — a vain hope that voters would determine that Trump was mad, bad and dangerous and they were better sticking with an elderly incumbent. Overall, Team Trump headed by Susie Wiles (now White House chief of staff) and the lobster-guzzling Chris LaCivita come across as 10 times as street smart as Team Biden.
Missing among all the campaign expletives (“fuckeroo” is a new one for this reviewer) is a deeper analysis of why Trump was able to stage one of the greatest comebacks in US political history. Original Sin allots barely two pages to the border issue and Harris’s own indifferent record.
Cultural issues — notably the devastating Republican TV ad claiming the Biden administration supported federal money for gender reassignment — are given short shrift. Above all, the resurgence of inflation, from energy prices to insurance premiums, pushed voters into the Trump camp. The Biden White House focused on impressive job creation and low employment but ignored pocketbook issues.
Overall the media were so focused on Trump and his campaign antics that they lost sight of the manifest weaknesses of Biden and then of Harris. This was collective groupthink — the same charge levelled at the Biden cabal in the White House.
Hence the trope that had Biden dropped out earlier, there would have been a “robust” primary election process which would have thrown up a host of credible alternative candidates. The checklist includes governors Pritzker (Illinois), Whitmer (Michigan), Shapiro (Pennsylvania) and Newsom (California) as well as vice-president Harris, not to mention former transport secretary Pete Buttigieg. The consensus is that Biden staying in guaranteed a Trump win.
We will never know for sure. The test for Democrats is the next US presidential election in 2028. As for Biden, his legacy is irreparably tarnished. His sole consolation is that he was right about Trump being a threat to American democracy. He was just the wrong candidate.
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson Hutchinson Heinemann £25/Penguin Press $32, 352 pages
Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes William Morrow £25/$32, 352 pages
Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple Harper Influence £38/$32, 240 pages
Lionel Barber is a former editor of the FT
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