“He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”
a Democratic strategist, quoted in Original Sin
The authors call it the “original sin,” but it might be more accurate to describe it as the terminal symptom of a political class that had stopped believing its own rhetoric. Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election in 2024, despite years of visible decline, was not a private lapse of judgment. Everyone knew. They whispered about it at fundraisers, in green rooms, behind closed doors—and then did nothing. The Democratic establishment, the liberal press, and the Biden lifers inside the White House all chose the same thing: loyalty over honesty, access over accountability, silence over truth. In Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson name the names, reconstruct the timeline, and let the contradictions fester in plain sight.
Many books have emerged dissecting the Democratic implosion of 2024: instant histories, insider accounts, and partisan polemics. I reviewed one such example—Chris Whipple’s Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History—last month, which offered a vivid, if occasionally too forgiving, narrative of campaign missteps and personality clashes. That book, though narrower in scope, complements Tapper and Thompson’s broader narrative: both depict a presidency where intimacy became insulation, and political management became denial. But where Uncharted zeroes in on the First Lady’s gatekeeping, Original Sin expands the indictment to include nearly everyone who had a chance to speak up—and chose not to.
But the real scandal wasn’t Biden’s stubbornness, or even the complicity of those around him. It was the failure of the party itself: the DNC, the donors, the superdelegates. Their job was simple: choose a candidate who could win. That was their only job—and they blew it. It was never going to be Biden. And once boxed in by the calendar, it couldn’t be Kamala Harris either. The party had three years to face reality. It chose fantasy and farce.
Groupthink
“We attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realise the extent of the decline.”
quoted in Original Sin
Tapper and Thompson open the book with a line that has already become emblematic of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign collapse: “He totally fucked us,” said David Plouffe, Obama’s former strategist, who was drafted in to salvage Harris’s brief run after Biden finally dropped out in July—barely 107 days before the election. But the most revealing sections of the book are not those that chronicle the scramble to pivot after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate against Trump. It is the slow creep of denial.
From Biden forgetting the names of longtime aides, to being shielded from early morning meetings, to his wife completing his sentences in private donor gatherings, the evidence of his decline is presented as cumulative, devastating, and crucially—known. “This isn’t hindsight,” one Democratic official tells the authors. “Everyone saw it happening.”
The book spares no one in Biden’s so-called ‘Politburo’—Donilon, Ricchetti, Reed—who didn’t lead so much as barricade. Less a leadership team than a human border wall, they closed ranks, shut out dissent, and kept the truth at bay. Nor does it spare Jill Biden, whose transformation from reluctant spouse to palace enforcer is one of the more revealing character studies in the text. But perhaps most striking is the role of loyalty. Not just to the man, but to the myth. The myth that Biden always got up, that he was never counted out, that he could not be broken. The faith of the inner circle became an ecclesiastical delusion: to question Biden was to blaspheme.
This is where the parallels with late-period Soviet governance feel less like metaphor. The authors quote one aide comparing the Biden White House to ‘boiling frog syndrome,’ but at least real frogs try to escape. Democrats didn’t. They stayed in the pot, like Politburo functionaries wheeling out Chernenko1, pretending the system was fine while everyone could see the rot. This was the political version of Weekend at Bernie’s.
Maps of Defeat
If Original Sin shows how the Democratic Party collapsed inwards, the New York Times’ May 2025 data project—How Trump’s Return Became Inevitable demonstrates what happened outside the Beltway: vast swathes of the country turned red. More counties went for Trump than in either of his previous campaigns. Voter enthusiasm surged, not just among the MAGA base, but across new territories where Democratic infrastructure had long since withered. The maps show the extent of the conversion: Ohio is gone. Nevada is gone. Parts of Minnesota and New Hampshire, long considered holdouts, shifted too. The suburban firewall collapsed. In state after state, Republican margins ballooned. The Times’ piece doesn’t just chart a Republican win, it shows a national realignment.
This was not just about turnout or persuasion. It was about belief. Millions of Americans drank the Trump kool aid—again. Not in spite of January 6th or authoritarian threats, but because of them. This, more than Biden’s condition, is the central terrain of American politics now: a hardening of ideological fronts. While the Democratic leadership cosplayed 1990s centrism, the right built an insurgent, mythic, and in many places popular mass politics.
The Press That Looked Away
In their authors’ note, Tapper and Thompson insist this book is not an “exoneration” of Trump, nor an endorsement of the apocalyptic political mood that has followed his return. But the timing of their revelations. After the election, after the collapse, after the defeat. Is in itself a kind of mea culpa. Particularly for Tapper, a senior CNN figure, the book reads as a form of post-hoc journalism: the truth spoken too late.
It would be inaccurate, however, to attribute this media failure solely to Tapper or CNN. Other publications and columnists have since admitted a deeper malaise. A Washington Post op-ed argued that Biden’s condition was under-reported due to liberal bias and fear of aiding Trump. The New Yorker pointed to limited access, self-censorship, and the culture of deference that surrounded the White House press pool. Whatever the reason, the result was the same: the biggest story of the 2024 race was never covered until that debate, and the race was already lost.
This is the hidden thread in Original Sin: that the fourth estate failed alongside the party machine. Liberal commentators offered eulogies to “democracy” and “norms” while rationalising the cover-up of a failing president as political necessity. They mistook propaganda for a strategy. And when Biden finally dropped out, their only answer was Kamala Harris, the vice president they’d previously scorned, now expected to save the republic in 107 days.
“They’ve been gaslighting us,” one top Democrat told the authors, after watching footage of Biden failing to engage during pre-recorded 2020 convention sessions. The word has become overused in recent years, but here it fits: a sustained institutional effort to make the public doubt what was plainly in front of them.
The legacy of Biden’s presidency, then, is not just about an old man who stayed too long. It is about what his staying revealed: a party without mechanisms for truth, a media class afraid of candour, and a political system in which myth mattered more than mental capacity. The New York Times’ county-level data lays bare the scale of the realignment: entire regions lost, millions turning to Trump not in protest but in allegiance. Will voters ever forgive the DNC—not just for choosing Biden, but for handing the baton to Harris? Will they forgive a press corps that still refuses to call out lies issuing from Trump’s mouth or his administration’s White House press briefings? In choosing not to see, in choosing to pretend, they made Trump inevitable. That is the story Original Sin tells. And it is the story many in the DNC would still prefer left untold.
Footnotes
- Konstantin Chernenko led the Soviet Union from 1984 until his death in 1985. Visibly ailing throughout his brief tenure, he was rarely seen in public, often unable to speak, and frequently absent from key functions. Soviet media continued to air footage of him voting or attending meetings. Soviet media continued to air footage of him voting or attending meetings—usually pre-recorded, heavily edited, or staged to maintain the illusion of active leadership. Rumours circulated that he had already died or was effectively incapacitated. Chernenko came to symbolise a regime in denial: one that dragged a dying man through the theatre of governance because it had no succession plan and feared the consequences of truth. ↩︎
Artificial Intelligence (9) Book Review (78) Books (82) Britain (35) Capitalism (9) Conservative Government (35) Creeping Fascism (12) diary (11) Donald J Trump (45) Europe (11) Film (11) France (14) History (9) Imperialism (16) Iran (10) Israel (14) Keir Starmer (10) Labour Government (25) Labour Party (9) Marxist Theory (10) Migrants (13) Nigel Farage (13) Protest (14) Reform UK (21) Russia (12) Television (9) United States of America (85) War (19) Work (9) Working Class (9)
