This is a dispiriting book. We can be so easily deceived by our leaders, not to mention the media, who themselves may have been deceived and misled. To quote Karl Kraus: "Politicians lie to the press and then believe what they read.” ***
I remember my good friend, political scientist and historian, Andy, who insisted in 2020 that Biden would be a one-term president, a place-holder, if you will. I was a supporter of Andrew Yang, who, I thought, had the only good handle on the real problems of the economy (technologies assumption of traditional manufacturing jobs – something Trump doesn’t get either) and I worried that Biden wouldn’t have a handle on them and that we needed an eight-year candidate, not an automatic lame-duck one. Turns out
Jake Tapper’s book reveals things were far worse than I thought and he comes right out and blames Biden’s entourage for not revealing how bad things were until the last minute. This prevented a healthy debate among possible candidates at least two years before the election and it would have made Trump out to be the mentally deficient one. That horrible debate never would have happened.
Hah! But perhaps the real scandal is not that the family and staff hid all this deterioration from the public, but that the media was either completely incompetent or so liberal they didn't want the public to know fearing it might empower the MAGA camp. Then, of course, what they did report was labeled as "fake news” by the Biden White House. For example:
The numbers were undeniable. From January 1, 2023, to April 27, Biden had only four public events before 10:00 a.m., twelve full weekends with no public events, and only twelve public events after 6:00 p.m., most of which were off camera.
“The White House is basically hiding Biden as he auditions for another term,” Alex wrote.
The White House denied the story. Jen O’Malley Dillon gave a one-word statement: “False.”
The White House press team publicly labeled Alex a peddler of fake news.
That Biden and his team knew his physical or cognitive health would be a limiting factor, not signaling that earlier effectively blocked a robust primary process. That wasn’t just a political failure; it’s a democratic one.
It was also a huge media failure as Eugene Volokh pointed out in an essay:
[Journalists] job was to dig and find out—before things became evident, not after (and indeed some indications of Biden’s decline were indeed evident for some time before the debate). Alex Thompson, the coauthor of Original Sin, elaborated on this problem:
“I had one conversation with someone, this was after the election, while we were reporting this book, and this person said, ‘Listen, yes, we deserve blame for X, Y, Z. We were hiding him. We were.’ But this person also sort of got in my face, and they said, ‘Listen, the media deserves some blame, too.’ Like we were sort of amazed at some of the stuff we were able to spin and get on,” he said.
Thompson admitted there was truth to what the person was saying about the media and its lack of skepticism about Biden’s administration.
“They’re just like, ‘You guys should not have believed us so easily.’ And I thought that was like a really interesting, but I also think that’s true,” he said. “I think the media, . . . in a lot of ways, was not skeptical enough and did not remember the less[on] that, they do it to different degrees, but every White House lies.” *
But Democrats also had to share much of the blame. Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson had both complained about being shut out of the primary process by the DNC. Dean Phillips, who was concerned about Biden’s mental deterioration and was trying to get midwestern governors to challenge Biden, decided to run himself and soon discovered numerous roadblocks created by the Democratic leadership.
This comment by an insider sums up my feelings: “A year later, that official told us, “I blame his inner circle, and I blame him. What utter and total hubris not to step aside and be a one-term president, as he said he would, and have an open primary when there was time to let the process play out. Even though he did so many good things for this country, I can never forgive him.””
According to Tapper and Thompson, in a Commonwealth Club show,** Biden never said that. It was something put out by his aides even as they knew he would be running again. During the later stages of the 2020 Democratic primary (late 2019), reports emerged that Biden told aides he might serve only one term — as a “bridge” president — and wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024. (nypost.com+politico.com) Shortly after these reports surfaced, Biden unequivocally denied that he was planning to serve just one term. Asked by reporters, he said: “No, I never have. I don’t have any plans for one term.” A campaign aide also called the one-term talk “just not true”. The whole point of the book and this interview is that we were lied to and he was hidden. Turns out whatever bridge anyone was talking about was really a cliff.
**Interesting Commonwealth Club interview with Thompson and Tapper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuHihDaZVJY
***The original quote is „Wie kommt das überhaupt, dass Kriege entstehen? Die Diplomaten belügen einander und glauben es, wenn sie es in der Zeitung lesen.“ Die Fackel, issue No. 406 (circa 1915. World War 1 followed shortly thereafter. Kraus was particularly disturbed by how propaganda, media complicity, and political self-delusion could spiral into catastrophe — a theme chillingly relevant in many later conflicts.
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