The book that puts its finger on the sore spot of Biden's disastrous election campaign

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It's called Original Sin , the book that is being talked about these hours on Capitol Hill and in various American talk shows and which will be released on May 20. Written by CNN TV personality Jake Tapper and Axios writer Alex Thompson, Original Sin is the story of how and why Joe Biden withdrew during the 2024 presidential race after winning the party primaries, leaving the green light to his vice Kamala Harris. But more than about palace maneuvers, the text - from what we understand from the excerpts released in these hours - bordering on political pornography, is an account of the progressive physical and mental ailments of old Joe, for which the authors interviewed over two hundred people near and on Pennsylvania Avenue . The subtitle is in fact The decline of President Biden, his cover-up and the disastrous choice to run again. After their destructive defeat against Donald J. Trump, a man who had attempted a coup a few years earlier, Democrats began the blame game, placing the burden of the electoral defeat squarely on Biden.

This book continues to rub the blue donkey’s sore spot, even blaming those who allegedly hid the candidate’s deterioration. According to Original Sin, the 81-year-old was said to be using a wheelchair as early as 2023, due to his bad spine, but they would have decided to do so, possibly, only after his re-election for a second term. After he tripped on a sandbag at the Air Force Academy in June 2023, the White House tried everything it could to prevent similar incidents from happening again, and so new rules were introduced: shorter walks in front of the cameras, sneakers on almost every occasion, someone to hold his arm when he walked, and very precise written instructions for where to go and what to do at all times during speeches, press conferences, and ceremonies. The only thing missing was foam to cover the edges or electrical outlet covers like you do with babies. Precautions and fear, at least until the vote, to prevent the Maga world from further intensifying the narrative of a doddering “sleepy Joe” manipulated by puppeteers, a narrative pushed and ridden by Trumpian rhetoric, which in fact had a small moment of terror when the acid green Brat summer with coconuts started and Trump found himself facing a challenger much younger than him .

It was the televised debate, with its stammering and broken voice, that made America realize that Biden might not be able to keep up with Trump’s insulting gab. But inside the Biden circle – and this is one of the accusations made by the young members of the Democratic Party – it was known that the president, at 81 years old, was not doing very well, just as it was known only in the Oval Office that Franklin Roosevelt, struck by polio, would not make it to the end of the war. “The White House lied to us,” Tapper whines. The super Obama strategist David Plouffe, later called by Harris for a “rescue mission,” says in the book: “Biden has completely screwed us. Our party has been screwed by Biden.”

But the real push would have come from two of Biden's historic allies and friends: Barack Obama and George Clooney, who then asked the president to step aside in an article in the New York Times. In Tapper and Thompson's book, it emerges that the stance of the two kingmakers would have taken place on the evening of an important fundraising event organized by Clooney where Biden, arriving to shake his hand and thank him, would not have recognized the actor. "It's George Clooney," an assistant would have suggested after a few seconds of chatter. "Oh, right!", the president would have replied. The Hollywood star, the book says, would have left him "shocked to the core". At the same event, at the end of the evening, after Biden responded too vaguely to some of the presenter's answers, Biden would have disappeared backstage and instead went straight to the edge of the stage staring at the motionless crowd. Obama would have been forced to take him under the arm and accompany him backstage, noticing the alleged decline. Original Sin, which peeks through the keyhole into Biden's last two years as president, undermines the party's attempts, however clumsy, to rebrand, and throws Biden's successes (which are not few) out with the bathwater. A Biden who recently, angering many Dems, returned to TV saying that he probably could defeat Trump a second time. "After all," said the former president, "Trump is a loser."

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