Bad old Joe and his politburo

In 2020 Biden won the US presidential election. In 2024 he ran again, until the Democratic Party pushed him out of the race. Both times, defeating Trump was his campaign’s existential rationale. In their book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson find that the ‘Biden theology’, instead of being an antithesis, itself embodies the narcissism, self-delusion and outright lying that Democrats accuse Trump of.

Republicans have been pointing to signs of Biden’s physical and cognitive decline for years, saying it made him unfit for the presidency. In public, Democrats dismissed all such doubts as pure partisanship. In private, it was an altogether different story.

For the world, the cover was blown by the Biden-Trump debate of June 2024. As David Plouffe, Obama’s celebrated 2008 campaign manager, put it, it was a DEFCON 1 moment, where two men only three years apart felt separated by thirty instead.

The Biden that the world gasped at this June night had been around, the book finds, since at least 2022. The one who doesn’t just forget names and lose his chain of thoughts in a way everyone does sometime or the other, but who looks to be suffering dementia or Alzheimer’s or something else neurological.

Ahead of the debate, George Clooney hosted the biggest ever Democratic fundraiser, raking in more than $30mn. But, ouch, when Biden hobbled over, with an aide guiding him by the arm, and another aide prompting, “You know George,” the president didn’t recognise the actor despite the millions and the movies.

At the D-day commemoration the same month, Macron witnessed Biden shuffling and forgetting, and said he was gêne on Biden’s behalf. Embarrassed. Some weeks later, a top Democrat met the First Couple privately, and found Jill having to complete Joe’s thoughts. “He was clearly not f***ing fine.”

A private Biden family motto is, “Never call a fat person fat.” This cocooned them in a strange circle of groupthink. Everyone put their shoulder to scripting his public appearances heavily. This meant exhausting amounts of prep by staff, not to mention coaching by Spielberg. Even so, the hours during which Biden could put up an effective performance shortened. He grew heavily reliant on note cards even for private discussions, including cabinet meetings.

How did family and staff who hid this Biden from America justify it? One after another, they tell Jake and Alex that the fundamentals of the presidency are about making sound decisions, and there they thought Biden solid.
But not too many people saw him on a day-to-day basis, or unmediated by his closest advisers. The book calls this small group ‘the politburo’. They shielded him in every meeting, from all bad news. Most worryingly, if the president’s decisions were being elaborately influenced and shaped by the politburo, were they even his decisions?

Plus, the presidency isn’t just about making decisions, the book underlines. It’s also about communicating the decisions to the public. Biden had slipped in talking to the American people, and also in listening to them. Nothing announced this as loudly as the walkback from his 2020 words: “Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as something else.”

Empathy is his superpower, the loyalists kept insisting. It’s what makes him the Anti-Trump. Yet, in the end, Bidenomics became about telling Americans what they were feeling about the economy was wrong.

The lessons of the book go beyond one man, one political party, one country. It remembers George Orwell saying, we are all capable of believing things that we know to be untrue for an indefinite time – but sooner or later the false belief bumps up against solid reality. Usually on a battlefield.