Bombshell Biden Book Draws More Attention After Cancer Reveal

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Joe Biden often forgot top White House aides’ names, occasionally resorting to shorthand descriptions of roles like “Press” for longtime communications chief Kate Bedingfield. There was discussions of him possibly needing a wheelchair in a second term, and he sometimes ate dinner as early as 4:30 p.m. He seemed completely unfazed by a jarring debate performance that sent the Democrats into a spiral and put donations on ice. While attending a glitzy Hollywood fundraiser for his crumbling re-election campaign, he at one point blanked when face to face with George Clooney, one of the biggest stars in the world.

These are just some of the details contained in the stunning and excellent Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again from journalists Alex Thompason of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN. Through more than 200 interviews with Biden insiders after Election Day, Democratic operatives, and frustrated loyalists who feel betrayed, the pair paints a damning portrait of an insular President whose team coddled him to the point of severely limiting his evening bookings, shielding him from bad news, and letting him continue to spout information that was objectively not true.

To say this book has been the talk of the town would undersell its current buzzy dominance. Even when Biden revealed a prostate cancer diagnosis on Sunday, it was hard to digest the news outside of the conversation reignited by Original Sin about how much Biden and his team were hiding about Biden’s capabilities to continue the job for four more years.

Before the announcement of that cancer diagnosis, I sat down with Thompson for a chat about this project, which is out today. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

TIME: What was Biden’s team thinking? 

Thompson: I think in every political organization, regardless of party, there’s a tension of loyalty to your principal and loyalty to the bigger mission. In Biden’s camp, the tug of war clearly went to the side that cared more about him and themselves than they cared about the larger mission, the White House and the country. And I think that’s how they rationalized, not just having him run for reelection, but rationalizing that this guy could do the job for four more years. Many believed that it eventually would’ve precipitated into a constitutional crisis because he would’ve not been up to the job. And the people around him were not willing to admit it.

None of them confronted the principal. That’s telling about the culture that was created in which questioning or stress-testing created suspicions of disloyalty. Who created that culture?

It’s a combination of Joe and Jill, and then I’d say the two enforcers around them, which was Anthony Bernal on the Jill Biden side and Annie Tomasini on the Joe Biden side. These are people who are obscure and you have never heard of.

But they are seen not just in White Houses but at Royal Courts throughout world history. The ultimate loyalists who believe that at the end of the day, they are the only ones who have the principal’s true interests at heart. Questioning them means you have a target on your back.

It’s also on Joe Biden, Jill Biden, and their immediate inner circle for not creating a culture where dissent was welcomed. 

Which runs exactly counter to Joe Biden’s experience as Vice President, where a team of rivals in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s framework was encouraged during his first eight years in the White House. 

In fact, Joe Biden, by Obama and his telling, was instructed to dissent in meetings in order to stir the pot so that people would come off their risk-averse positions and really engage, because in these high level meetings on policy and on politics, people are always looking over their shoulder for someone to try to use a position to knife them or to hurt their standing with the President. Over time, anyone who really questioned the theology of Biden was eventually kicked out, and the only people remaining in that inner circle are the truest of true believers. 

Did Joe Biden think he was up to another term? 

Yes. That’s why I think people want to point the finger at Jill and like the other aides. At the end of the day, this was Joe Biden’s decision. Joe Biden thought he deserved to be reelected. Joe Biden believed he could have done it. There’s always been a caricature—a true one—of Joe Biden as a guy with a chip on his shoulder, but by 2022, 2023, that chip had grown to the size of a boulder. 

You describe a Politboro around the President. Did they ultimately serve the President or did they serve themselves? 

We used that because we did think it was apt, but people inside the administration would refer to them that way. 

They also referred to Ron Klain as the Prime Minister. 

When you have a President whose energy is limited, whose time is limited, whose bandwidth is limited, then a lot of decisionmaking filters down. And there were big decisions being made that people who had served in previous administrations and were surprised that Joe Biden was not involved in. One Cabinet member put it to us this way, and this is more so the case in 2023, 2024: the President is making the decisions, but if you present the decisions in a certain way, often it’s not really a decision. 

People have told us that they would spend as much time planning how to present decisions to Biden to make sure they could be done quickly and often would try to make it binary. That was the case as early as 2022. And that process became even more so the case 2023, 2024, which is also part of the reason why the circle shrank and shrank and shrank. 

What was the relationship with the Vice President? 

So Kamala Harris always wanted to say she was always in the room. That was not always true. 

Why not?

Biden is a guy who likes people he’s known for a long time. He hasn’t known her for a long time. That being said, she voluntarily made herself one of the biggest validators of Biden’s health. After Robert Hur’s report, she went out there and said, “He’s completely on it.” She didn’t have to do that. Her comments did not age well. 

Some of the details in this book are frankly damning. For instance, Biden taking a whole day to nap at Camp David during debate prep. What happened? 

Beyond their own self-interest and Biden’s ego? If you believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy, to the republic, it’s very easy to rationalize anything. A lot of people around Joe Biden believe an 86-year-old Joe Biden is still better than Donald Trump. And I think a lot of Democrats agree with them. 

Is that healthy for democracy? 

No. We have a long-time Biden aide who said very explicitly all that mattered was that he win and then he could disappear and only have an occasional moment of a sign of life. And that when you vote for someone, you’re voting for their advisers, too. But these are unelected people. If you think Trump is a threat to democracy, you can even rationalize doing things that could arguably be seen even by your own colleagues as undemocratic. 

Why this project? 

So I had been covering Biden’s age going back to 2021, but especially starting in 2023, people were leaking that they were concerned not just about the reelection campaign, but about the four years after the campaign. After Nov. 5, Jake Tapper and I felt two things. One, the most important moment of this entire campaign was when Joe Biden decided to run for reelection. 

There wasn’t really a moment where that was decided. It was just always assumed, right? 

Well, Joe Biden did at one point say, “We’re going, right?” There was no hinge point. The most important decision of the 2024 campaign was Joe Biden deciding he was going to run for reelection. The second thing that both Jake Tapper and I thought was there is more to the story than what’s been reported before. And people might be fine to say the truth. When we embarked on the project, we didn’t know if that was going to be the case. I feel like I only got 10% of what happened at the time. 

What do you make of the Bidens’ plural pushback and preemptive prebuttal of this book? 

It’s apt to say Bidens plural in the same way that aides now refer to their post-presidential office. Not his post-presidential office. 

That wasn’t by accident. 

You look at a lot of the aides in the post-presidential office, a lot of them are either from the First Lady’s office or connected to the First Lady. They feel that he had a good presidency, but his legacy is going to be tarnished for the next few years in Democratic Party circles. Their prebutting, it speaks to the denial within that inner circle that our reporting with over 200 interviews really demonstrates. 

What role did Dr. Biden play in the march towards reelection until it ended? Did she want a second term? 

Absolutely. And her top aide repeatedly would talk about things they would do in a second term, trips they wanted to take, goals they wanted to do. Her evolution is interesting because she used to be a reluctant political spouse, then became probably the most enthusiastic one. She had no strong policy views, but she did want to stay in the trappings of power. At the end of the day, Joe Biden made the decision, but she was completely on board and also kept it going. 

You were one of the first people to be out there with reporting on the President’s decline, which was in plain sight in the rear view mirror. How did we become so desensitized to it? 

There’s a difference between someone making a meme of him stumbling up the steps of Air Force One and him having moments of not being capable behind the scenes. I think it was easier to dismiss or rationalize some of those public moments. I think the more troubling things were actually happening behind the scenes. I could have written a story every single day about Biden made a gaffe, Biden is old. My stories were about what was going on behind the scenes. Aides were frustrated because the President’s schedule was so limited to the hours between 10 and 4, and it was very difficult to schedule any sort of public event outside those hours. 

Dinner at 4:30 is a pretty damning detail. 

Those schedules that were shared were only shared after Election Day because even the people who knew that something was wrong or that he wasn’t necessarily up to four more years still thought this is better than Trump.

Turning to the Vice President here, Biden referred to her as a work in progress. Why did he pick her if he didn’t think she was up for the job? 

It’s a great question because even some of his top aides when we were reporting this book said that the actual original sin is not him running again. It’s picking her. And there are a lot of people within Biden world that feel that that decision was made for political expediency. 

The truth is that his heart was with Gretchen Whitmer because, of those two, Gretchen Whitmer is more of a Biden Democrat. So even once they won, there was this culture of “Yeah, help her, but don’t go out of your way” because some people thought it was another sort of instance of disloyalty. 

The book reads like a tragedy. Was this avoidable? Could Joe Biden have sidestepped the sad ending of this? Or was this preordained? 

It was avoidable in the fact that Joe Biden could not have run again and decided to settle for one term. But was Joe Biden based on his entire biography, capable of doing that? I don’t know. 

So the toughest square foot of real estate in American politics is Joe Biden’s head. And you spent a lot of time there. Why did he think he should have run for a second term? 

Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness. Joe Biden’s greatest strength is his perseverance. It’s your tragedy through political setbacks and eventually his never quitting. The real answer of why Joe Biden ran for reelection is he thought he deserved it; he just doesn’t ever quit. 

A through line of this reporting that I hadn’t really considered was the Beau Biden situation where they successfully concealed his health challenges, which may have taught them the wrong lessons. Walk me through that process. 

Based on the Bidens’ own memoirs, in August of 2013, Beau Biden goes in for brain surgery and they find a brain tumor and it’s glioblastoma, and they don’t get it all out. Six months later, while he’s still the sitting Attorney General of Delaware, they have his doctor say he has a clean bill of health even though he’s going to be the Attorney General for another year. During that year, he stops doing interviews, his speech is slipping, his energy is basically non-existent. And the Bidens believe in this power of positive thinking, “We’re gonna’ get through this. He’s not gonna die. He’s fine, he’s gonna be Governor or President.” 

There is a world if Beau Biden does not get cancer, he is elected Governor of Delaware in 2016, which he’d already declared for, and then runs in the 2020 primary. And Beau Biden is president in 2021. A lot of Biden people still talk about it that way as the great ‘What if?’ So this combination of the power of positive thinking and the Biden just ethos of “it’s none of your business,” which can very quickly turn into you’re covering up something that should be public knowledge. And that is what happened in 2014. 

There was no reckoning with concealing Beau Biden’s terminal disease. Instead, there was an outpouring of grief and empathy. They got away with it because there was no reckoning with that decision. That experience made them even more bunkered and them-against-the-world. 

Do they realize what they did? Or are they still in denial? 

Well, denial sometimes means you know it, but you can’t bring yourself to say it. 

Do they know it? 

I don’t know. They are certainly in denial. They believe he could have won. They believe he could have served another four years. Sometimes I think it’s protest too much. And there are a lot of people not in that inner circle, but in the White House and around them who feel that they are not in denial. And they do recognize that maybe they should have spoken up or maybe they should have confronted him, at least had the conversation. No one, because of the culture around Biden, got in his face and said, “Hey, maybe you’re not up for this. Not just the campaign, but for the next four years.”

There weren’t many people willing to do that. Not because there not smart people, but because they felt that doing so would hurt their own internal standing 

What has that bunker mentality done for folks to this day? 

A common thread through people that Jake and I both talked to was some of them felt they were like coming out of a fog and replaying scenes in their head of “When should I have known?” Or “When should I have realized that this was a bigger deal?” Or “At what point was his being old turn into something different?” I think some of them felt—Joe Biden’s decision, what else are they gonna’ do? 

What does history ultimately write about Joe Biden? 

A lot of it depends on what happens with the second Trump term because Biden himself framed his entire presidency as hinging on defeating Trumpism. And the fact that Trump came back makes it look like a failure because he was the one who set those stakes. Despite passing significant pieces of legislation, despite an effective, very quick rollout of the Covid vaccine, and other things that could arguably age well, one of the central questions of this book is: How did Trump win? And we felt that this was actually the most important answer to that question.