In a book set for publication next week, journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson wrote that former President Joe Biden’s aides were concerned that he might need to use a wheelchair if reelected to a second term, Axios reports.
Tapper and Thompson make the claim in Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again, which publisher Penguin Press says is “an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.”
The aides to Biden, 81 at the time, said that having him use a wheelchair during his 2024 reelection campaign would be a bad idea, but that it might become necessary during a second term because of spinal degeneration.
“Biden’s physical deterioration—most apparent in his halting walk—had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election,” Tapper and Thompson write.
Tapper appeared on CNN to discuss the book, and said, “This is all part of a larger whole where the Biden White House tried to hide the extent of his deterioration, both physical and cognitive, as much as possible.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
