May 15, 2025

THE FALL OF JOE BIDEN — AND HOW HIS TEAM COVERED UP HIS DECLINE:

At the start of an election year that would be gruelling for a candidate half his age, the US president’s stiffened gait was already a clear sign of age-related decline.

But Biden and his inner circle were forced to discuss a worse prognosis.

“Advisers talked about how he may need a wheelchair in a second term,” says Alex Thompson, co-author with Jake Tapper of Original Sin, a book telling the inside story of the ill-fated 2024 Democratic Party presidential campaign.

“He had significant spinal arthritis and his spine was degenerating to the point that, if he either had another bad fall or maybe just because of time, he would have needed to be in a wheelchair.”

In the grand tradition of American presidential medical reports, this was barely hinted at in the description of Biden’s “moderate to severe” arthritis and “mildly decreased range of motion” that was relayed to the public in February 2024.

The revelation of the “wheelchair debate” is just one of many telling glimpses behind the scenes by Tapper and Thompson into the “insane” attempt to convince America that Biden, then 81, was fit to serve in the White House until he was 86.

Even more outrageous than his true physical state was the failure to carry out any kind of cognitive assessment, given that Biden’s frequent gaffes, memory lapses and odd behaviour were increasingly sounding alarm bells with voters who saw signs of a president well past his prime.

“He passes a cognitive test every day,” said Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, when asked why no formal evaluation was carried out.

This came at a point when Biden was not yet confirmed as the Democratic candidate but was not being opposed by party heavyweights out of deference to his judgment. They had little idea how bad his condition was getting because access to Biden became tightly controlled by a cabal of family members and senior advisers known by senior Democrats as the Politburo, the book claims.

Of course, the Politburo needs a Pravda, and Tapper and the rest of the Washington press corps were happy to play their part:

Despite the sense of inevitability about Biden’s implosion conveyed in the book, compiled from 200 or so post-election interviews, the authors are bracing for significant blowback on at least two fronts once it is published next week. On the one hand there are critics already decrying the idea of journalists who did little to expose Biden’s fragility throughout his presidency now claiming to tell the inside story, and on the other hand there is the Politburo who still believe Biden would have beaten Trump. “I would have loved to know any of this and break it last year,” Tapper says. “I mean, we learnt all this after the election. We weren’t wise to this. We saw it the way everybody else saw it, which was, yeah, he looked bad, but everybody behind the scenes was saying he was fine. And then came the debate.”

Shades of Dan Rather’s infamous statement, as quoted by Howard Kurtz in September of 2004, after being caught cooking the books:

CBS anchor Dan Rather acknowledged for the first time yesterday that there are serious questions about the authenticity of the documents he used to question President Bush’s National Guard record last week on “60 Minutes.”

“If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story,” Rather said in an interview last night. “Any time I’m wrong, I want to be right out front and say, ‘Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.’ “

As a result, Ace of Spades writes, “Jake Tapper Reportedly Hires a Crisis Communications Firm to Stop Criticism.”

Mark Halperin, among others, has a different view. “One thing that’s not true is that the cover-up was so good that no one could see this, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten to the bottom of this during the election,” he said. “It is not true that it’s only after the election that Jake Tapper could’ve gotten to the bottom of this, and the rest of the Washington press corps could’ve gotten to the bottom of this.” The media were not simply “stymied from getting to the truth” by lying White House aides, Halperin argued. “No, they were part of the conspiracy and the cover-up. They allowed themselves to believe the ridiculous spin on TV and in public, and privately they allowed themselves to be browbeat,” he said. “They were told, you will lose access … Reporters who covered any story the Biden people didn’t like were denied access.”

Media reporter Dylan Byers noted Tapper’s insane levels of “self-promotion and sanctimony” are even bothering to annoy his fellow leftwing hacktivists.

And now we know who made that deceptively-edited video that both Tapper and Thompson linked, which purported to show, through cheapfake manipulation, Tapper showing any interest in the story.

Ace has a compilation of media headlines defending Biden, including this classic from AP: “Biden at 81: Often sharp and focused but sometimes confused and forgetful”…”And from the Federalist: nine times Tapper showed what a valuable soldier he is for the Democrat Party by insisting Biden was ‘mentally sharp.'”

Tapper and Thompson’s book is an attempt to put a Band-Aid on an enormous scandal involving both the White House and the media whom it gave marching orders to. And while its details are fun and dishy to read, I want to go much deeper. Take this clip from a year ago today:

Who thought it would be a good idea for Biden to challenge the world’s biggest media persona to a debate? Who allowed this clip of an angry Biden with at least five jump cuts in it to go out? I don’t necessarily need to know the name of the intern who loaded up Premiere Pro and did the donkey work, but who signed off on the clip? Did he think nobody would notice all the edits? Did he not put two and two together and say, “Wow, if the president can’t shoot 14 seconds of continuous usable video, how can he handle a ninety minute live debate?” Was he trying to sabotage Biden’s reelection bid in order to replace him with Kamala? Just get ahead of another news cycle? That’s the book I want to read.

As Duane Patterson writes (accompanied by an AI-created image of Tapper wearing Ray Charles’ sunglasses and carrying his cane: Media Still Missing the Big Story — Who Ran The Country For Four Years?

Where are the tell-all books that get to the bottom of the true scandal of the last quarter century – who was running the country now that it’s been established that the cognitive and physical decline of Joe Biden was much more severe than previously reported? You’ve got a media enterprise in the nation’s capital whose sole job is to challenge the premise of the White House, whomever is in it, and get to the real truth. But we get crickets about who was making consequential decisions for at least the last year of the Biden administration? Why? Logic would conclude that one of the reasons why there’s no journalistic curiosity is because if that truth and scandal were reported as it deserved to be, Kamala’s chances would have diminished further. Her role in the coverup, being one of the people lying to media about Biden’s condition, and she would have been disqualified for office. The Trump margin of victory almost certainly would have been wider, and the House and Senate might have seen larger Republican majorities as a result.

* * * * * * * *

My humble, but sincere advice for my friends in media, and I do have dozens of them that are friends, is it’s hard to take them seriously when they won’t admit their failings in coverage of the Biden regency. If you want to regain trust, go where the story goes, not where you want the story to go. And I’m telling you, the story is who was running the country the last four years, and why there was no accountability in government. Why did the 25th Amendment fail as a failsafe apparatus against an obviously incapacitated president?

Find me a reporter that gets to the bottom of that, regardless of whether they lean left or right on the ideological spectrum, they’re going to be the first ones that lead the media herd back out of the wilderness.

After every presidential election, a leftist media grandee takes one for the team and apologizes, just a little, for all of his industry’s biased reporting during the election cycle. But the last four years of being deeply in the tank for a president who took office resembling John Gill, and left it at risk of becoming Capt. Pike in the wheelchair deserves much more inside detail than Tapper and Thompson’s meager efforts.

UPDATE: In The Wake Of Biden Book ‘Bombshells,’ One Pressing Question Still Remains.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll