Original Sin Is a Political Chernobyl for the Democratic Party

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again is a political neutron bomb, quietly primed to obliterate the remaining illusions sustaining the Democratic Party's fragile post-2024 narrative. Set for release on May 20, 2025, the book is already provoking tremors throughout Washington, with CNN’s Scott Jennings aptly branding it a "nuclear bomb" during a live segment. The metaphor is not hyperbole. If the reporting holds up to its promotional promise, this book may prove to be the most damaging insider exposé in modern American political history, not merely recording a political debacle, but implicating the entire Democratic establishment in a conscious, calculated deception.

Let us begin with the essential claim: Joe Biden was unfit to run for president in 2024, and the people closest to him knew it. They hid it. Worse still, they acted with a zeal that suggests the machinery of party politics has not only broken down but has been actively inverted. The pursuit of power did not merely blind Democratic leadership to Biden's cognitive decline, it compelled them to manufacture a fiction, sacrificing the credibility of their own offices and institutions. The original sin, in Tapper and Thompson's telling, was not Biden’s decline itself. Decline comes for us all. The sin was in pretending it wasn’t happening.

Here we must be precise. The authors conducted over two hundred interviews with sources ranging from cabinet secretaries and governors to Hollywood donors and Biden family confidants. The resulting portrait is not of a confused old man deceiving those around him, but of a political family and a party elite conspiring to deceive the public. The decline was not secret. It was systemic. And, as the book argues, it was covered up in bad faith.

This presents an immediate problem for Democrats. One cannot speak of Trump’s election as a black swan event or the result of "disinformation" when one’s own party engaged in precisely the sort of truth distortion it claims to deplore. The public was not misled by Russian bots, but by the very men and women who occupied the West Wing, who sat on MSNBC panels wagging their fingers, and who signed off on press releases painting a rosy picture of a man losing his faculties.

The moment of revelation came, according to Tapper and Thompson, during the first debate with Donald Trump on June 27, 2024. That night, the facade collapsed. Millions of Americans saw, unfiltered, what insiders had whispered for months: a president unable to complete thoughts, confused by questions, drifting in and out of lucidity. The debate did not create the perception of decline. It confirmed it. And once confirmed, it triggered a cascade of panic, betrayal, and collapse. Donations dried up. Surrogates fell silent. The campaign withered.

But Tapper and Thompson do not lay the blame at Biden’s feet alone. That would be too easy. The real indictment, and the reason this book is so dangerous for the Democratic Party, is that it turns its lens on the entire apparatus of progressive politics. Biden's aides, his family, the drive-by media, and the donor class are all portrayed as complicit. This is not a story of one man's downfall. It is a story of institutional rot.

Why is this so perilous for Democrats? Because it undermines the single moral premise upon which modern liberalism has rested since 2016: that Democrats are the party of truth, facts, and science, while Republicans are the party of spin, lies, and authoritarian delusion. If Original Sin succeeds in demonstrating that top Democrats knowingly propped up an incapacitated candidate and concealed that fact from voters, then the moral high ground evaporates. What remains is not righteous indignation, but partisan symmetry. And that, for Democrats, is radioactive.

Consider how this plays in the media. Jake Tapper, no MAGA firebrand, co-moderated the very debate that helped expose Biden’s condition. He is not writing from the outside. He is embedded in the journalistic establishment. Alex Thompson, a veteran of Axios and CNN, likewise belongs to the insider class. Their voices are unimpeachable from the left’s perspective, which makes their criticisms devastating. When critics from within turn their pens against the cause, the damage cuts far deeper than any Breitbart exposé or Trump rally tirade ever could.

There is an irony worth savoring. For years, Tapper was a persistent defender of Biden against charges of mental decline. He was, in some respects, part of the very information machine that now finds itself in the crosshairs. This book, then, is a kind of confession as well as a condemnation. It is the journalistic establishment’s attempt to launder its own complicity by belatedly exposing what everyone in Washington already knew but refused to say aloud. That self-preservational instinct should not distract us from the deeper truth: this is not simply a story about media failure, but about the collapse of political judgment on an institutional scale.

Democrats are not ready for the fallout. Already, whispers swirl about potential successors, about whether Biden will be forced into full retirement, whether party leaders will be dragged into hearings. The problem is not merely that Biden ran when he shouldn’t have. It is that everyone around him enabled it, justified it, and cashed in on the illusion. What Tapper and Thompson seem to document is not a Greek tragedy of fate, but a Shakespearean saga of vanity, ambition, and betrayal.

One might object, of course, that the book’s impact remains speculative. That much depends on public reaction, on media coverage, on the extent to which Democrats themselves are willing to reckon with what happened. Perhaps the book will be spun as just another postmortem, a reflection of hindsight bias, or even a journalistic betrayal of confidence. Perhaps.

But even if its reception is muted, Original Sin will remain a permanent record, a paper trail of cowardice and concealment. And unlike campaign spin or editorial sleight-of-hand, books endure. They are quoted, studied, footnoted. They become source material. In the historical accounting of 2024, this book will matter.

We should also note the strategic implications. With Trump now firmly reinstalled in the White House, the Republican Party enjoys a kind of narrative vindication. The Democratic panic over Trump’s return is now inseparable from their own decision to run a visibly declining man as their champion. Every executive order from Trump, every judicial nomination, every repeal of a progressive regulation can now be traced back to the moment the Democrats decided that pretending was preferable to preparing.

What lesson will Democrats draw from this? That remains to be seen. But the early signs suggest a reluctance to confront the real issues. Some still claim the election was lost because of youth apathy, or economic messaging, or media bias. Few are willing to say aloud what Original Sin appears to make inescapably clear: that the Democrats lost because they lied to themselves, and then to everyone else. And when the curtain was pulled back, it was too late.

One is reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s famous indictment of the Soviet regime: "We know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. And still they lie." That, it seems, is the moral atmosphere Original Sin captures.

And in that atmosphere, no political strategy survives.

Whether this book marks the beginning of a serious reckoning or simply the formal obituary for a once-proud party, its publication is an inflection point. If the Democratic Party has any institutional memory left, it will read Original Sin not as an attack, but as a mirror.

A mirror, cracked and brutal, but accurate nonetheless.

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