Every four years, the confused, the despondent, and the curious look to campaign postmortems for more details—gossip, really—on what happened in the last presidential election. These tell-all books are usually the work of reporters who hold back key tidbits as the contest unfolds to make the books more revealing when they appear.
In 2016, for instance, journalists Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen wrote Shattered, which revealed the monumental dysfunction inside Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency. Among their revelations: Clinton’s campaign had received warnings that the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania required more attention. Nevertheless, in a heady brew of hubris and incompetence, Hillary and her staffers refused to shore up the Democratic “blue wall,” reducing her to a punch line in one of America’s most spectacular presidential upsets.
That Parnes and Allen book raised a serious question. Why did they not reveal this information during the campaign, when the conventional wisdom was that Hillary was on her way to defeating Trump handily? As National Review’s Jim Geraghty asked when Shattered came out, “Wouldn’t it have been nice to know there was a ‘feeling of impending doom’ inside the Clinton campaign last year?”
The reason Parnes and Allen did not come out with this information at the time lies in the methodology and mindset behind post-campaign books, which date back to Theodore White’s legendary Making of the President series. White began his series in 1960 and continued it for two decades beyond that, giving readers never-before-revealed insider information. In the process, he inspired a host of imitators.
For these “fly on the wall” books, the understand-ing was that journalists would get the inside scoop about infighting, strategic decisions, and just plain old dirt from campaign officials, with the stipulation that the books would not be published until after the campaigns were over and all was resolved. Writing them in the aftermath of the election also allowed the journalists to tell the story with an air of inevitability. With the results known, they could impose a grand design and ordered narrative to the chaos that is a campaign.
But Parnes and Allen’s 2017 work did something relatively new. Their revelations about the incompetence of the Hillary campaign ran counter to the reportage of the 2016 race as it took place. This proved controversial for two reasons. First, it spilled the beans on a candidate who had been lauded by the press as both competent and inevitable. And second, it exposed the media as not only biased but willfully blind in covering their preferred candidate.
Fast-forward to today: A new raft of books is emerging from the 2024 campaign, including another by Parnes and Allen (Fight), as well as Chris Whipple’s Uncharted and, most prominently, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin. These books reveal that Joe Biden was badly diminished and in no shape to run a presidential campaign or serve as president.
The authors claim to be teaching us something new. What they are really doing, though, is telling us what we already knew but that they are only now willing to tell us. Tapper in particular has come under fire since he claims he did not realize the extent of Biden’s decline during the campaign. As he told Piers Morgan in one of his non-apology apologies, “I feel like I owe the American people an acknowledgement that I wish I had covered the story better.”
Not only did the public see in Biden what Tapper didn’t, but the public also saw Tapper as a participant in covering up the truth. During the Biden years, Tapper attacked and dismissed those who even raised the issue of Biden’s age. The release of his book forced him to confront his own record during his book tour. When confronted about an interview in which he had berated Lara Trump for arguing that Biden was significantly diminished, Tapper told Megyn Kelly, “After we did the research for this book, and I realized how bad the acuity issues were, I apologized to Lara Trump.” Thus, according to Tapper, he had had to do a deep dive to see and hear what a visually impaired and hearing-impaired person could see and hear about the cognitively impaired Biden. And even as Tapper spoke about the post-election research he did engage in, he did not manage to ferret out that Biden had an advanced stage of prostate cancer—something Biden’s team put out on the eve of the Tapper-Thompson book release to distract from it and generate sympathy for Biden.
No one is reading these books with any measure of surprise that Biden wasn’t all there in private, behind the scenes. That’s because Biden wasn’t all there in front of the scenes, either. This fact was most glaring during his disastrous June 2024 debate against Trump, which eventually forced the then sitting president from the race.
All three books tell stories about Biden’s inability even to prepare for the debate. According to Whipple, the practice sessions went so badly that Democratic debate-prep guru Ron Klain comforted himself with the thought that “Biden had always been a game day player. Maybe the president would rise to the occasion as he had done before.” Hope, as they say, is not a strategy.
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Since there are no real revelations in these supposedly revelatory volumes, one has to look elsewhere for the real story: the media-enabled cover-up by a handful of White House insiders now known as “the Politburo.” The Politburo was made up of Biden handlers Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, and Mike Donilon; first lady aide and attack dog Anthony Bernal; and family members Jill and Hunter Biden. And here the books get interesting, because they do expose not only the delusionary nature of the Politburo in propping up Biden but also the various forms of self-justification they engaged in to continue their charade.
In Whipple’s Uncharted, the author of books on White House chiefs of staff and the heads of the CIA argues that those engaged in the cover-up resided in some kind of bubble of denial. Inside the bubble, it was more important to remain in lockstep than to recognize reality. Bill Daley, a former Obama chief of staff who was one of the few people willing to go on record in these books, saw it as a kind of groupthink. Even after the debate, Reed and Ricchetti told Whipple that the problem “wasn’t Biden’s infirmity, it was three weeks of Democratic infighting, and the media’s obsession with the debate performance.”
Whipple, it should be said, is a Biden fan who wrote a glowing, even fawning, portrait of the first half of the Biden administration called The Fight of His Life. Presumably Politburo members would have had reason to expect positive treatment from him. Even so, with the exception of Daley, most of Whipple’s sources kept themselves cloaked in anonymity. Still, Whipple talked to enough insiders to come up with some damning revelations.
Take his disclosure that no one was even raising the issue of Biden’s condition with the president directly. Apparently, Tom Donilon told Daley he did not believe that anyone had spoken to Biden about the age problem, including Tom’s brother, Mike. Whipple characterizes Daley’s response to this as follows: “If Mike Donilon, Biden’s alter ego, hadn’t spoken to the president about his age, it was almost certain that no one had.”
Think about the trail of information revealed here. Mike Donilon was unwilling to speak on the record to Whipple, but he did speak to his own brother Tom. In those conversations, Mike never mentioned speaking to Biden about his age, a fact that Tom, also not on the record, shared with Daley. From this, Daley intuited that if Mike Donilon did not have the guts to raise the issue, then no one else in Biden world had done so, either.
While it’s clear that these people were in a bubble, the existence of the bubble does not fully explain the why of it all. These are presumably people with some measure of intelligence and political skill. Why was the bubble so thick that they were unable to pierce it and recognize the reality of what they were facing? How could they not ask the very reasonable question that Daley asked, “How are they letting this f—ing thing go on?”
The other two books in the troika provide some additional insight. According to Tapper and Thompson, nothing mattered more to the Democrats than defeating Donald Trump. Trump was considered an existential threat to American democracy, so any action, including lying to the American people about the president’s condition, was justified if it was in the cause of defeating Trump.
Essential to this theory was the idea that because Biden had defeated Trump in 2020, and no one else had defeated him before, then Biden, no matter how infirm, was the only person capable of defeating him in 2024. The thinking here is blinkered. While it is true that Biden did win in 2020, Trump had defeated only one other Democrat at that time, Hillary Clinton in 2016. The sample size to make the determination that only one person in America could best Trump was preposterously small. Yet according to Tapper and Thompson, when Democratic strategist David Axelrod raised the question of Biden’s capabilities to Biden’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, Klain came back at him hard with this rationale: “Who else is going to do this, Axe? Who else is going to beat Trump? President Biden is the only one who has done it.”
Does that mean that the inarguably compromised Biden, regardless of his age, was always going to be a better candidate to defeat Trump than any younger foe? This brings us to the real issue, which was that the alternative to Biden was not the universe of potential candidates but Kamala Harris. Harris was an unpopular figure, a weak thinker, and a poor candidate, but the politics of the Democratic Party would not allow it to look elsewhere other than the first female African-American vice president.
Anyone following American politics knows that Harris’s performance as vice president and as presidential candidate was wanting, but the Tapper and Thompson book highlights just how poorly suited she is to politics. In one anecdote, when Harris is invited to go to a dinner party held by Washington influencer David Bradley, her team had to have a “mock soiree” in which her staff members pretended to be guests with whom she would mingle. So, as vice president of the United States, she actually had to prep to attend a dinner party at the home of a guy who used to own the Atlantic.
In another story, Harris goes on CNN’s Anderson Cooper show to defend Biden after that historically bad debate performance. Cooper, no right-winger he, asks a standard question about when Biden’s decline began. Harris is irate at this treatment and, according to Tapper and Thompson, rages afterwards that “this motherf—er doesn’t treat me like the damn vice president of the United States,” adding, bizarrely, “I thought we were better than that.”
These phrases are not rendered between quote marks in the book, so she clearly didn’t say them to Tapper and Thompson. Yet somebody heard her say the words and conveyed it to the reporters. The story reveals a thin skin as well as a real sense of entitlement. Who exactly is “we” in her formulation, and what exactly are “we” supposed to be better than? Harris comes off so poorly in Original Sin that it seems that the desperate cover-up was not just to save the country from Trump but from Harris as well.
The Harris story reveals an insufficiently discussed part of the cover-up. The Politburo worked hard to hide Biden’s condition. But whom were they trying to fool? It was not the voters, since they saw enough footage of Biden to make their own assessments. What they were trying to do was force their fellow Democrats and the legacy media to stay in formation, like the Greek phalanx in which everyone had to stand together in a circle (bubble-shaped) or everything would fall apart.
Given this goal, the conspirators’ efforts targeted Democrats who might complicate Biden’s chances of running again. These included Cabinet members, who could potentially invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office either temporarily or permanently. As a result, they rarely saw Biden. And when they did, it was in highly scripted situations. The cloak of darkness was also cast over lower-level White House staff who could have blown the whistle. Even after the disastrous debate performance, Tapper and Thompson report, “Steve Ricchetti told a nervous aide that the debate wasn’t a big deal.”
Donors were also largely shielded from Biden. When attending fundraisers, Biden used talking points with the most basic directions, even at the most informal and friendly events. Tapper and Thompson make clear how detrimental it was when Biden did a fundraiser in Hollywood and failed to recognize George Clooney. Clooney would eventually write the damaging op-ed in the New York Times that signaled that even Hollywood leftists could not get behind the senescent Biden.
Another group the Politburo tried to con were Democratic senators. As Whipple notes, “Senators complained they rarely saw the president.” Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer had his concerns about Biden, but he also worked hard to keep his fellow Democrats in line. According to Tapper and Thompson, Schumer “talked about it with his staff but he felt he had to keep a tight circle.”
Schumer believed that if word got out that party leaders were even talking about Biden’s age, “that would make it even harder for him to win.” Despite his efforts, Schumer absolutely knew better. According to Tapper and Thompson, Schumer had told people that he had a “Plan B” for what to do if the Biden debate went poorly, a plan he eventually had to put into motion.
All this shows that the Politburo was right to fear Democratic insiders—because it wasn’t Republicans who forced Biden to resign but Democrats. It was Schumer who went to see Biden in Delaware and tell him that the jig was up. It was Nancy Pelosi who kept the pressure up on Biden with her ambiguous media comments and behind-the-scenes machinations. It was Clooney who wrote the devastating op-ed. And it was Hollywood mogul Jeff Katzenberg, with his admission that he couldn’t effectively raise money for the campaign anymore.
Despite the world crumbling all around them, the inner circle never broke ranks. This raises the third reason, beyond groupthink and the desperation to beat Trump, for the cover-up. Parnes and Allen argue that the Politburo was motivated by venality. Its members were desperate to maintain their own elevated positions.
Parnes and Allen provide a revealing quote from Donilon. It is not direct, of course, but comes via a “prominent Democrat.” According to the source, Donilon said, “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” The nobody he is referring to could have been Biden, but it could also just have easily been Donilon and Ricchetti and Reed and members of the top Biden team who had access to the house and the plane and the helicopter, along with their patron.
Tapper and Thompson note this dynamic as well. They report that when “discussing the insanity of the situation with a House Democrat, [House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete] Aguilar remarked that ‘folks like Ricchetti and Donilon—they’re living the first line of their obituaries right now. People don’t give that up.’”
The top Biden people were not only protecting their own access and their reputations, but their families as well. Donilon, Reed, and Ricchetti all had relatives on the administration payroll, including all four of Ricchetti’s children. They would not get to keep those jobs if Biden stepped down.
Once these people were on board with the need for the cover-up, it was difficult for them to see the reality of Biden’s infirmity. Other realities became distorted as well. Ted Kaufman, a longtime Biden aide who once had briefly replaced Biden in the Senate, shared the mindset. He argued to Whipple after the debate that when even the exceedingly Biden-friendly New York Times started asking questions, it was plotting against Biden: “I’ll bet you $1 million that they had an executive editorial board meeting and said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do, guys.’” If you’re supporting a Democratic incumbent and you think the New York Times is conspiring against you, you have crossed the line into madness. Kaufman was dismissive of the Clooney op-ed as well, saying, “I don’t care, George, with all due respect. I know you’re famous and you’re important and people kiss your ass every day. But George, I’m just not interested!”
The Politburo stayed in lockstep until the blowback from the debate made its position unsustainable. Without that debate, its members would never have wavered, regardless of the potential consequences. As former Bill Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta told Whipple, “Everybody was marching to the same tune. And there was nobody there to say, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ They just never had a grown-up in the room who could look Joe Biden in the eye and say, ‘What the f— are you doing?’”
It’s a good question. It’s just too bad the Politburo members were not asking the question—or being asked it—when they were propping up someone dangerously unfit to be president at the time they were refusing to ask it. While these books are interesting as a window into what the Biden team was doing as Biden was clearly flailing, the authors fail to grapple with the fact that they and their colleagues in the media were not asking Panetta’s question, either. Biden was serving as president throughout, when the people closest to him and the people working for him should have been protecting the country from him.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
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