A Must-Read I Tried to Avoid Reading

Jake Tapper's new book is a masterpiece of reporting

I have to confess that I had no intention of reading Jake Tapper’s book Original Sin (Penguin Press, 2025) whose subtitle is President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, And His Disastrous Decision to Run Again. For months, we’ve been deluged with stories about how Biden was increasingly out of it as his administration went on.

Much of this was politically slanted and problematic, and I was increasingly irritated that so little attention was paid to the clear cognitive decline of the nasty monster who is, after all, almost as old. But Jake Tapper is a very good and hard-working reporter, the book received a lot of attention, and I decided I needed to read it.

I was right.

Tapper and his co-author, Politico’s Alex Thompson, talked to hundreds of sources, and established beyond the shadow of a doubt that President Biden, who was mentally fit when his term began, was by 2023 in no shape to run for reelection, that the inner circle around him knew it, and yet worked hard to cover this up, presumably so they could hold on to their jobs and power.

This was terribly and obscenely irresponsible, and was really a complete betrayal of their responsibilities to the United States of America, especially given that their actions and dishonesty helped a fascist monster bent on destroying democracy return to power. In addition to describing the train wreck of the 2024 Biden campaign, Original Sin tells some disturbing truths about how “democratic” the Democratic Party really has been, and anyone sane is bound to be disturbed by the answer.

For like it or not, our only hope for saving democracy, this nation and perhaps the world is a reformed Democratic Party. The Republican Party as it now exists has sold its soul to fascism as practiced by Donald Trump, in exchange for more money for billionaires. There’s no one other than the Democrats who could form a credible democratic government, no third party with the institutional know-how and personnel.

So we have to do better. The late and sainted Jimmy Carter was in great shape in his old age, and when he was 80 said “no one should be president when they are 80.”

We can do better. In fact, we must do better in picking candidates and having a strategy, or we the people are quite literally going to be over, in more ways than one.