The Original Sin Infomercial

When book promotion equates with journalism

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It is the greatest political conspiracy of modern political history: A deeply buried secret that all members of the president’s cabinet, staffers, and up to the levels of his family have gone out of their way to cover up the mental decline of an 82-year-old leader of the free world.

But at the same time, everyone can see that he’s old…

With all the political upheaval going on in the United States and the world, for much of the week, many legacy media outlets have spent an obsessive amount of coverage reporting on a new book titled “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” written by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson. The premise of the book claimed that Biden’s decision to run again despite evidence of his “serious decline” had “led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting.”

According to excerpts reported by the press, Biden aides discussed whether to use a wheelchair if he were re-elected, while former senior advisor David Plouffe said Biden “totally fucked us” by staying in the race for too long and tanked any chances of Harris from winning. Another revelation came from an excerpt released in the New Yorker, when the then-president did not recognize George Clooney in a fundraiser gala, who later wrote an op-ed urging Biden to drop out. Though it should be noted that the account was disputed by people who were in the scene, and figures from former DNC chair Jamie Harrison to Biden’s then-National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan have disputed details from the excerpts that connect to them. Moreover, Tapper and Thompson (At the time of writing) are not trained psychologists or have consulted any professionals on whether Biden is displaying mental decline as part of their reporting.

Suffice it to say, if you have been following American media in the last several days, you have received a barrage of news analysis, book reviews, and opinion pieces commenting on Joe Biden’s failings as president. If you Google “Original Sin book,” the photo below is a snapshot of what comes up from news coverage.

Is there journalistic value to it? I would argue yes. Biden’s belated announcement that he is stepping out of the race, following weeks of pressure since the disastrous June debate last year, is an interesting story with intrigue to many readers from both sides of the political spectrum. Politically, Joe Biden’s decision to seek re-election has affected the trust of many voters and is partially responsible for Trump getting elected to a second term.

I concur with Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg when he admitted that Biden had “maybe” hurt Democrats by running for re-election. “With the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that’s the case.” I dabbled after the debate on maybe Biden should stay to decide he should drop out of the race by early July, a week after the June debate. With hindsight, I definitely would agree that Biden should have dropped out much earlier, and I had thought about Biden announcing he wouldn’t seek re-election after the 2022 midterm elections, being a much better alternative.

Regarding the dominating narrative that many in the media are portraying about Biden and his departure, there is a sense of overreach in framing the narrative more than it entails. Based on the excerpts so far, it shows people around the Biden circle have acted irresponsibly in handling the president’s age and deciding what’s best for the country, but I don’t think it has immediately reached the level of a full-blown conspiracy. Polling has repeatedly shown that voters think Biden is too old throughout the 2024 race, and I don’t think a cover-up is meant to be glaringly obvious. Many pundits have portrayed Biden’s departure as the singular reason that the Democrats lost to Trump, which is simply not the case. There are a variety of political factors at play that are against the Democrats coming into last year’s election. As I have noted before, I would put the ultimate blame on the voters (Specifically Trump voters, third-party voters, and those who didn’t bother to turn up) who led to the current president’s victory.

Moreover, all of this should be water under the bridge for the general audience. Aside from painful but necessary Democratic Party introspection, all of the talk of Biden’s mental decline and how it affects his job as president is now history. Unless Joe Biden competes in the 2028 primary, there are more pressing issues to cover, both in the US and the world.

Of course, things and information can change. For transparency reasons, I should note that I haven’t read the Original Sin book yet, and I like to leave an open mind on political issues since they can change over time. However, I believe the promotion and coverage of the book deserves some scrutiny and criticism. During the agonizing weeks when Biden was considering whether he should drop out or not, I wrote a media critique on how the media was piling on this story. Since I last wrote this piece (Which you can check out below), my critique mostly holds up.

Take the renewed interest on interviews conducted between Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur: On Friday, a report by Axios’s Marc Caputo and Alex Thompson (The latter is a co-author of the Original Sin book) suggested the recordings appear to validate Hur's assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The excerpts showed the former president making pauses and halting replies to Hur’s questions, which seemed damning when taken out of context. After Axios released the full audio of Biden and Hur’s interviews on Saturday, Newsweek magazine pointed out, “Biden remained largely engaged throughout the interview, and some of the pauses occur at deeply emotional moments while he is speaking, particularly when discussing Beau's death.”

That has led to a backlash from liberals, ranging from the fact that the release coincides with Moody's dropping America’s full score credit rating for the first time, to the insensitivity in taking Biden’s slow response to answering a question about his son Beau’s death as a sign of mental decline.

Harry Sisson, liberal political social media influencer, replied to Axios reporter Alex Thompson's post sharing the audio, "Seriously? You're upset that a man speaks slowly when he's reliving the death of his son? This isn't journalism. It's a hit piece."

He later posted: "I truly hope that none of these MAGA supporters and journalists go through the pain that President Biden has faced in his life. Mocking a man for speaking slowly while he discusses his dead son? That's f***** up. Shame on anyone who's jumping on that ship right now."

Another liberal dismissal of the audio came from journalist Aaron Rupar, who boasts nearly 1 million followers on X, who wrote Friday: "So to be clear about what happened here, the Trump White House released audio meant to make Joe Biden look bad to Axios hours after the US's credit rating was downgraded. Trump wanted a distraction and the usual suspects in the press are happy to oblige."

…

Journalist Aaron Rupar wrote in a Friday X post: "Looking forward to reporters finding new ways to talk about Biden Old every day of the Trump presidency"

Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of left-leaning MeidasTouch, wrote in a Friday X post: "I refuse to get distracted by trivialities like this when new stories are breaking about Biden struggling through a 2023 interview."

In a second post, he wrote: "So we are on Year 6 of wall-to-wall 'Biden is Old' media coverage. Very exciting. Very relevant. Ratings gold."

Fred Wellman, a retired U.S. Army officer and host of On Democracy with FPWellman podcast, wrote in an X post: "This is f***** up. This is how a son of a b**** that never lost a loved one handles someone else's grief. F*** this."

All of this has been setting up for Tapper and Thompson’s book release on May 20, and the obsessive coverage leading up to it has reflected flaws of mainstream media that have led to growing distrust of the news.

Just to be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong about journalists promoting books they have written, and media outlets covering important facts that came out of books. (We can spend time delving into whether reporters should hide or keep information they learned until they can fit it into a new book, but that doesn’t apply here.) If Tapper and Thompson believe the public is interested in Joe Biden, now a private citizen with no actual political power, and his mental acuity in 2025, go ahead and sell your book.

However, there is a vast difference in coverage between reporting on Original Sin compared to other books about the 2024 election. Before Original Sin, there were three books about the 2024 election that have addressed or reported on Biden’s mental decline: “Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History" by Chris Whipple; “Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House" by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes; and “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power” by Alex Isenstadt. Although there is some coverage by the media on the three books published between March and April, reporting on Original Sin has massively outweighed coverage on the three books combined.

Not only have the media relentlessly reported on the issue, but media outlets have been seeking to branch out as much as they can to ensure Democrats are trapped in this media hole. Politico ran headlines like “Dems confront the first real litmus test of 2028: Biden’s mental acuity,” while the New York Times went for “Democrats Who Championed Biden’s Re-election Bid Now Seek Atonement.” Reporters have repeatedly asked Democratic politicians who were seen as potential 2028 candidates about Biden’s past, acting as if there is a groundswell of concern against Biden’s age, four months into the second Trump presidency.

And then there are the obsessive promotions, not just from Tapper (Seen in the first photo of this article) promoting his book during his news show and Thompson on social media, but from fellow journalists and pundits. who have heaped praise on the book. One of the most prominent examples is CNN’s Dana Bash (Who co-anchors a show with Jake Tapper), who tweeted this.

Meanwhile, pundits have been lashing out at Biden by citing the new book and its revelations as if it were July 2024. Here is a test for the readers, which article by Maureen Dowd, a NYT columnist, was written about Joe Biden in May 2025 instead of July 2024: Is it the one titled “The Tragedy of Joe Biden” or “For Biden, a Race Against Time?” (The answer is the former one).

All of this leads to the ultimate point: Why obsessively care about this one particular story with no relevance in May 2025? I would argue this is Washington beltway talk being dragged to the public stage, with pundits and reporters amplifying and highlighting insider baseball talk to the general audience who may have long forgotten any of this. Quoting Ron Filipkowski, the editor-in-chief of the popular left-leaning independent media outlet MeidasTouch:

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson have a much-hyped book to sell and a Pulitzer to win.

Their friends across legacy media are willing and eager accomplices - because they have current and future books to sell too and it is a very incestuous and cynical business. The narcissistic, self-absorbed, and self-important DC chattering class think that Americans care in 2025 whether Joe Biden was fit to run for president in 2024. The only group of people who care about doing a deep dive into that subject right now is them, but they are determined to use their platforms to do their best to make others care.

With the obsessive infomercial-ing and reporting on the Original Sin book, it is understandable that many people feel Tapper and Thompson are being hypocritical for writing and promoting the book. In the realm of public opinion, MAGA supporters have lambasted Tapper for covering up Biden’s alleged decline and conducting revisionist history, while defenders from the Democrats and the pro-democracy realm have criticized legacy media for overhyping their coverage and hawking the book. A sign of how bad the backlash is came from a report by the Daily Beast, which stated that the authors have hired a crisis PR expert while they begin releasing the new revelations. That is another symptom of people’s general distrust of mainstream media, believing it is all an insider’s game. With the allure of independent media from both the political left and right, people are flocking to those platforms even though they reinforce biases and beliefs held by liberals and conservatives alike.

Since we are on the subject of the mental unfitness of old presidents for so long, don’t forget about the current president sitting in the Oval Office: Donald Trump. He’s mentally all there, isn’t he? He’s a young man at 78 years of age, no potential problems there! It’s not like media outlets are bending over to the president’s will!