Unoriginal Sin: Keeping Secrets

By BRUCE LOWITT

CNN news anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson admit they knew “all sorts of bad stuff” about then-President Joe Biden’s physical and mental problems during the run-up to the 2024 election but, Tapper said, they kept it to themselves “so the book we were working on about him wouldn’t be, um, dead on arrival.”

Tapper, co-author of Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, said if they had revealed everything they knew about Biden’s cognitive health last year, “he’d have lost the election to Trump by a million more votes than Harris did and we’d be losing a million or more in sales of the book.”

Original Sin contends that Biden’s aides pasted name tags on cabinet members, gave him note cards with subjects to be discussed, and considered the idea of providing him with a wheelchair.

“Hey, it worked for FDR,” said Mike Donilon, Biden’s chief strategist for his 2020 campaign. Informed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s aides took pains to limit the wheelchair’s visibility., Donilon said, “Well that was dumb. I mean, think of the handicapped vote.”

The timing of the book’s May 20 publication and Tapper’s promotion of it the week earlier was also awkward because of the revelation that Biden has prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. “Oh, we knew about that last year, too,” Tapper said, “but really, who wants to talk about someone else’s prostate? Ick.”

Critics of the book and its authors pointed out that when the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were covering President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, they reported everything they discovered each day, rather than holding major details until they could publish All The President’s Men.

“That was a whole different time,” Tapper said. “CNN, the first 24-hour news network, didn’t even exist then. Can you imagine a Mormon and a Jew trying to hide what they knew about a Quaker president? Which reminds me, a Mormon, a Jew and a Quaker walk into a bar and … Never mind.

“Woodward and Bernstein would’ve been criticized, crucified, and ostracized, and that would have been by Simon and Schuster, their publisher,” Tapper said. “If Alex and I did that with our book, Penguin Random House, our publisher, would have castracised … I mean crucified us, too.”

Instead, Original Sin has become a best-seller online among hundreds of thousands of voters who never thought there was anything wrong with Biden mentally or physically last year, didn’t realize he wasn’t running for re-election, or wondered why Oprah was the Democratic presidential candidate.