WILLIAM VOEGELI: Now It Can Be Told.
Biden was still a white male in 2024, but identity politics had come to work in his favor. It was hard to see how Kamala Harris could win the election, but even harder to see how she could be denied the nomination. In identitarian terms, Harris was a three-fer: the first woman, and black, and Asian vice president. No matter how bad her chances in a general election, Democrats recoiled from the prospect of passing over Harris, or even of making her fight for the nomination against other candidates. To do so would antagonize the constituencies her selection in 2020 had propitiated, as well as confirm Republican claims that Harris had been, from the outset, a minimally qualified affirmative-action hire. There was only one escape from this dilemma: sticking with Joe Biden as he ran for a second term and hoping that he could somehow make it through to November and pull off a second victory against Donald Trump. The June 2024 debate incinerated that strategy; the ensuing Harris campaign validated it.
Taken together, the three books provide enough evidence to discard one fevered conspiracy theory, which circulated after the June debate: Biden advisors, knowing his campaign against Trump was doomed, set their boss up in a pre-convention debate for the exact purpose of having him fail before he was formally nominated, giving Democrats time to swap in a different nominee. To the contrary, the thinking of Biden’s inner circle, described as “the Politburo” in Original Sin, was that Biden could still be president, even if he could no longer be a presidential candidate. The hope seemed to be that the “basement campaign” Biden had run during 2020’s COVID pandemic could be retooled into a basement presidency, where the commander-in-chief would make (or, at least, sign off on) policy decisions, which others in his administration and party would explain and defend.
Any chance that this plan would work depended on a compliant press, one that would voluntarily curtail the skepticism that is its reason for existence. Until such willed credulity was rendered untenable and humiliating by Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, journalists went along with the charade. As Jill Abramson, former executive editor of the New York Times, commented immediately after the debate, “Shame on the White House press corps for not [having] pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the President.” She did not recoil from naming the most obvious explanation for this dereliction of duty: “too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump.”
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Rather than try to tell people they weren’t seeing what they were seeing, most journalists took the slightly less audacious line of insisting that what people were seeing of Biden wasn’t conclusive. The key was to faithfully report the claims by Democrats that, behind the scenes, Biden remained sharp, commanding, and vigorous. Part of the motivation, as Abramson says, was to do their utmost to prevent Trump’s return to the White House. But another part was the refusal to concede that conservative media outlets like Fox News and the Washington Examiner had done a much better job covering a crucial story than the reporters and editors who disdain the “right-wing noise machine.” One Original Sin author, CNN’s Jake Tapper, was recently forced to admit when interviewed by Megyn Kelly that “the conservative media was correct” about Joe Biden’s decline, and that “legacy media” outlets like CNN need to do “a lot of soul-searching.” When Kelly confronted Tapper about instances where he had derided Republicans for raising the suspicions his book now confirms, Tapper could only say, “I feel tremendous humility about my coverage.”
Yesterday, Mediaite ran this dramatic headline about Original Sin co-author Alex Thompson: Alex Thompson Burns Source Over KJP Book Deal: ‘If You Don’t Tell the Truth, Off the Record No Longer Applies.’
Axios national political correspondent and Original Sin co-author Alex Thompson accused a New York publicist of lying to him about her work with Biden administration staffer Karine Jean-Pierre.
On Wednesday, Thompson took to X to respond to a Politico report from Eli Stokols that pulled together reactions from former colleagues of Karine Jean-Pierre to the announcement that the press secretary is putting out a book about her time in former President Joe Biden’s administration. She also announced she is leaving the Democratic Party.
Thompson’s focus fell to the part of the Politico report revealing that New York publicist Gilda Squire was working “informally” with Jean-Pierre while she was still at the White House and was even being copied on email communications. Squire has previously done publiclity work for major publishers like HarperCollins Penguin Putnam Publishing.
“Funny. The White House repeatedly told me that this was not true back when I asked about Gilda Squire’s involvement in February of 2024,” Thompson wrote in reaction to the report.
The reporter then shared emails with Squire in which he asked Squire if she’d been “enlisted” by Jean-Pierre. She replied by telling Thompson “off the record” that it is “unequivocally untrue” that she was working with Jean-Pierre.
“If you don’t tell the truth, off the record no longer applies,” Thompson wrote. “Here is Gilda Squire’s denial at the time.”
Fair enough. But as Megyn Kelly asks Thompson:
Because Tapper and Thompson want to keep working in DC, and don’t want to risk being frozen out by a future Democrat administration.