https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/books/review/originial-sin-jake-tapper-alex-thompson.html
This blistering charge is attributed to “a prominent Democratic strategist” who also “publicly defended Biden.” In “Original Sin,” the reasons given for saying nice things in public about the president are legion.
Yet Biden always bounced back. The fact that he defied the naysayers and beat the odds to win the 2020 election was, for him and his close circle of family and advisers, a sign that he was special — and persistently underestimated
But people who didn’t see Biden on a daily basis were increasingly taken aback when they finally laid eyes on him. They would remark on how his once booming voice had become a whisper, how his confident stride had become a shuffle. An aghast congressman recalls being reminded of his father, who had Alzheimer’s; another thought of his father, too, who died of Parkinson’s.
According to a forthcoming book by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf, Biden’s aides decided against his taking a cognitive test in early 2024.
Just how much of this rigmarole was desperate rationalization versus deliberate scheming is never entirely clear.
Biden and his team were incensed and tried “to slime Hur as an unprofessional right-wing hack,” but the authors defend his notorious line. They emphasize that it is incumbent upon a special counsel to spell out how the subject of an investigation would probably appear to a jury — and that what Hur wrote about Biden was true.
Tapper and Thompson vehemently disagree. They offer a gracious portrait of Robert Hur,
Even competently administered policy could not compensate for a woeful inability to communicate with the American people
In “Original Sin,” Tapper and Thompson describe him waking up the morning after the 2024 election thinking that if only he had stayed in the race, he would have won.