Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson stopped by Morning Joe to discuss their new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again.
The journalists’ book, published Tuesday by Penguin Press, makes the case that President Joe Biden’s aides covered up his physical and cognitive decline in the months leading up to his 2024 reelection campaign. In a starred review, a critic for Kirkus called the book “an authoritative indictment of a denial-plagued presidential run.”
Asked by host Joe Scarborough if he thought Biden was incapable of doing his duties as president during his last year in office, Thompson said, “By 2024, there were members of the cabinet that did have some concerns, not necessarily about the day to day, but what if there was a massive crisis in the middle of the night.”
Tapper added, “There were definitely people in his administration who wondered, after the [June 27, 2024] debate [against Donald Trump] who wondered who was actually running the country. That’s not something that Alex and I say, but it is something that Democrats and people who worked for Biden wondered.”
Nodding to the number of sources Tapper and Thompson interviewed for the book, Scarborough asked, “Did you have 200 people tell you this guy was incapable of being president of the United States?...Whoever you talked to, chances are good I know them and I talked to them in real time, and I never got that.”
“We spoke to 200, more than 200 people, most of them Biden-loving Democratic insiders, and almost all the interviews were after the election,” Tapper said. “Because after the election, people felt much more free to come forward and talk with us.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
