“This Is a Developing Story”: ‘Original Sin’ Authors Aren’t Done Probing the Biden 2024 Debacle
When Axios reporter Alex Thompson accepted an award last month at the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner, he saluted his colleagues in the press—and took them to task. Former president Joe Biden’s “decline, and its cover-up by the people around him,” was a story that “we, myself included, missed a lot of,” and, as a result, “some people trust us less.”
Thompson admits on this week’s Inside the Hive that he “felt a little odd to win an award for something I felt that we fell short on,” especially knowing “all the stuff we had in our book.” Though Thompson believes he was “aggressive” in covering Biden’s fitness during the 2024 election cycle, “we all could have done better.” Looking back, he says, “people were too trusting of people in power, and I think there should have been a lot more skepticism.”
There is no shortage of skepticism, and reporting, in the explosive new page-turner he wrote with CNN anchor Jake Tapper: Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Tapper and Thompson interviewed more than 200 sources, most of whom would only speak after November’s election, in exploring Biden’s cognitive decline and how top advisers, like Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, along with first lady Jill Biden and son Hunter Biden, kept the president in a bubble and helped conceal the extent of his decline, which ultimately led to the collapse of his reelection campaign in the summer of 2024.
Executive editor Claire Howorth and I spoke to Tapper and Thompson about their book, which has kickstarted a conversation around the former president, his party, and the press. We had this interview booked before Sunday’s shocking and tragic news that Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Tapper says the authors have not recently spoken to the Bidens, noting that “you might be surprised to hear that they are not fans of the book.”
“We are obviously sending our prayers and our thoughts and well-wishes to President Biden and his family with this difficult news of this diagnosis. I think what this news does is illustrate a couple things,” he says, which “is the difficulty when it comes to reporting sensitive health matters having to do with politicians, and also the need for transparency, the need for politicians to be transparent, especially presidents when it comes to their health.”
“But you know, our book is about a larger, separate issue than the battle he’s facing right now,” Tapper continues, adding: “Our book is about what the American people have a right to know, and what they were told during the last several years that was not accurate.”
“We build this book as a tragedy for a reason,” says Thompson, and “that’s partly because, you know, Joe Biden’s greatest virtue is that he never gives up. And it became a tragic flaw in the end. And I think it also speaks to the risks of running for a second term at his age. If he had won reelection, this would be happening while he was in the Oval Office right now.”
On the episode, Tapper recalls his experience comoderating Biden’s calamitous June 2024 debate with Donald Trump (“It was very upsetting to watch in person”) and explains why this moment “calls for reflection by the press,” similar to events such as the Iraq war and Trump’s shocking 2016 victory.
“Alex and I are not here to point out the people we thought especially screwed the pooch. But I will say, this has, without question, caused me to go back and look at my coverage with humility.” Though Tapper notes he covered issues around Biden’s age in the run-up to the 2024 race, he admits, “It’s impossible for me, knowing now what I know, to go back and think that I covered this adequately, or enough.”
“I think it’s healthy for every human being, but especially journalists, to reflect on what we missed and why we missed it, and the reasons why we did,” he adds. “I do think much of it is the degree to which the White House was lying—to not just us and the American people, but also to their own cabinet, their own staff, to themselves.”
It’s not only journalists who Tapper believes need to come to terms with the last election, as the “Democratic Party needs a reckoning with this.”
“People should not make any bones about this. It was a bad decision. It should never have happened,” Tapper says. “And as his condition got worse, somebody should have said something to him to say, ‘You can ’t do this. You’re not able to do this.’” He adds, “We can’t have this kind of secrecy about a president’s health. There’s just too much on the line. Congress and the political parties are just too weak and too deferential. We, the American people, deserve to know everything about their health. Everything.”
Thompson says the pair are still investigating what happened in 2024, as sources who declined to speak to him in the past are now doing so. Tapper says he expects to “have more information” in the paperback edition as they continue getting insider anecdotes. “I think this is a developing story,” says Thompson. “We did our very best at the very first draft of it.”
