In retrospect, there is no way to tell the story of the 2024 campaign without acknowledging that Joe Biden’s age — and, more fundamentally, his ability to do his job and to mount a campaign for re-election — was one of the central factors (if not the central factor) of the race.
But, until Biden’s disastrous debate in June 2024, it really wasn’t covered that way. I dipped in and out of covering Biden’s age, and so did many other reporters, but we did not always treat it with the level of importance it deserved. Speaking only for myself, I regret not foregrounding the questions about Biden’s abilities more in that early stretch of the campaign.
That doesn’t mean that other issues weren’t also very deserving of coverage during that period. But if there was reasonable doubt that the president of the United States was able to perform his job, it’s hard to imagine a more important story.
And, as it turns out, many of Biden’s own allies and advisers — not Republicans, not journalists, but Democratic operatives on Biden’s payroll — harbored doubts of exactly that nature. For my money, one of the only mainstream reporters who was consistently raising these questions early, in a tough but fair way, was Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson.
As 2022 turned to 2023 turned to 2024, Alex doggedly chronicled the steps Biden’s White House was taking to conceal the effects of his age and the concerns many of his advisers had. “I felt a little bit like I was out on a limb,” Alex told me in a recent interview. “And when you’re on a limb, you sort of look behind you and you feel a little alone.”
If you know how the 2024 election ended, then you know that Alex was right to be on that limb, chasing this story. With CNN host Jake Tapper, who moderated that fateful June debate, Alex has now co-authored “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which outlines numerous damning anecdotes of the concerns about Biden’s abilities from within his inner circle.
I’ve read “Original Sin” and recommend that you do, too. But I also have mixed thoughts on it. Here’s what I thought the book proved, what it didn’t, and what I learned from talking with Alex (full video interview available above):
Let’s start here. There is a lot in “Original Sin” that is highly alarming.
