Joe Biden’s political career has travelled through half a century but, on a sombre Sunday afternoon, his legacy and reputation were at once buried and resurrected over the course of a few hours.
How many times can a political party lose an election? When it comes to the Democratic Party and last November’s US presidential election, the bitter truth has been unavoidable: over and over.
Throughout the weekend, Democratic insiders and would-be leaders had been forced to revisit the ghastly spectacle of the then president’s ruinous re-election campaign due to new evidence that the Biden White House, his advisers and family members actively shielded the truth of his accelerating cognitive and physical decline from his own cabinet members, and from the public.
The latest re-examination was occasioned by Tuesday’s publication of Original Sin, the highly anticipated – and touted – investigation co-authored by Alex Thompson, an Axios reporter, and Jake Tapper, the prominent CNN news anchor.
Throughout Sunday, the anticipation and tone of condemnation towards the Biden camp was general. And then, announced late on Sunday afternoon, was the quietly shocking news that Biden (82) has just been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer with metastasis to his bones.
Just like that, the talking and venom and the relentless excitability were cast to one side.
Tapper co-hosted the presidential debate in Atlanta last June when Biden’s alarming performance pre-empted the death knell of his ambitions and, it turned out, of the party’s chances of returning to office.
Over the weekend, Tapper found himself in the novel position of discussing with his guests the content of his expose, which fixes an extremely uncomfortable spotlight on Biden’s inner circle and on the party’s failure to intercede. Tapper also appeared on sister CNN anchor shows to speak about the book, which, he promised, the public would find “shocking”.
Some of the details were hiding in plain sight. Of the infamous Los Angeles fundraiser which preceded Biden’s debate appearance, everyone could see the footage of Barack Obama seemingly guiding Biden offstage.
But in the book, it is reported that Biden failed to recognise the evening’s other star performer, George Clooney, requiring several heavy prompts from an aide. Attempts to limit and curate Biden’s exposure to the scrutiny of cabinet meetings and public events without teleprompters began as early as 2023. The preparation for the Atlanta debate did not bode well but nobody could have predicted how cruelly Biden would be exposed.
“This is the emperor’s new clothes playing itself out in real time,” Van Jones, the CNN Democrat analyst, told Tapper on his own television show.
“Everybody knew but everybody was afraid to say except for David Axelrod for two years that something is wrong here. I was shocked. I love Joe Biden – I don’t like him, I love him – and I was shocked to see his condition when he came out, and so was the world. There are people who knew and said nothing and that is a crime against this republic, and I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.”
If it is true that the few early voices of concern such as Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, and Bill Daley, the prominent Chicago Democrat and Biden ally, were splendid in their isolation, a more prominent voice was haranguing the Democrats about the unsuitability of their candidate from a long way out.
[ Maureen Dowd: The tragedy of Joe Biden is that he was poisoned by powerOpens in new window ]
Donald Trump’s condemnation of Biden was scathing, often crude, and it was consistent. On the night of the debate, Trump’s most devastating line came in response to Biden becoming entangled in a point he dismally failed to make.
“I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
It was a brutally succinct takedown, and restrained by Trump’s standards, and it marked the end of their contest. It took a full three weeks for Biden to exit the race, by which time Trump had survived, with miraculous narrowness, an assassination attempt watched on live television.
But almost a year after that debate, questions as to why so many prominent Democrats failed to do anything, either privately or publicly, about Biden’s candidacy, are not going away.
The recasting of Biden’s vainglorious insistence that he and he alone could defeat Trump, to the point where he and his inner circle placed personal ambition over the good of the people, intensified in the days after Kamala Harris’s defeat by Trump in November.
“We got screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, the Harris campaign manager, is quoted as saying in the book. “He totally f**ked us.”
And with Trump weighing in after returning from his gainful tour of the Middle East, Republican attention was once again fixed on Biden’s authority while in office.
“Whoever had control of the ‘autopen’ is looking to be a bigger and bigger scandal by the moment,” Trump wrote on Saturday.
He was responding to the release of the audio tapes of Biden’s seven-hour interview with then special prosecutor Robert Hur, which took place in 2023.
Ironically, it was the release of Hur’s report, in February 2024, that spurred Biden into delivering what proved to be his closing stanza as a credible public performer.
Incensed by Hur’s line that he came across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”, Biden offered a fiery riposte, televised from the White House in which he said: “I am well meaning. And I am an elderly man. And I know what I’m doing, I’ve been president and I have put this country back on its feet. I don’t need his recommendation.”
Then came the questions from the press pool.
“How bad is your memory? And can you continue as president?”
“My memory is so bad, I let you speak,” Biden said.
Had he left it at that, the rebuke would have been a blazing success. But as he walked away from the podium, he returned to answer a question on Gaza, and referred to the president of Egypt as the president “of Mexico”.
It was a gaffe, a cognitive stumble and it meant he departed having failed to silence the niggling questions that were reflected in opinion poll after opinion poll: the majority of Americans simply thought Biden was simply too old to run again.
Whether the US media was sufficiently persistent in querying Biden’s cognitive well-being during the wildly partisan election months is a broader issue.
“There were those of us who were pushing and probing and trying to find out more,” Tapper said on a BBC interview at the weekend. “But looking back on it now; not enough. I wasn’t doing it enough. And it is really shocking the degree to which this was hidden.”
On Sunday, North Carolina Republican representative and House judiciary committee member Brad Knott said that what had happened was “an act of deceit that was put upon the American people”.
“The Biden White House worked with the mainstream media to shield a very obvious truth. That’s what is alarming to me – they are trying to go back and say: ‘oh we were surprised by this’,” he said.
Knott hinted that the committee might seek a review of exactly who knew what during the years when questions over Biden’s mental alacrity came into sharper focus.
“Who was behind the desk? Who was making the decisions? And why was it kept from the American people?
That was the tone, then: a kind of bloodlust to associate the Democratic power base with the White House collusion that the latest book promises to expose.
Then came the statement about Biden’s health diagnosis and a radical shift in the tone of the news cycle.
“Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support,” Biden said in a post on X.
On Sunday morning, the consensus was that it would take many years, and perhaps decades, for the full measure of Biden’s 50-year career to be appreciated. With Sunday evening’s shock announcement, those appreciations had already begun. The acknowledgments of the many personal tragedies Biden has faced down became a flood.
It was as though having decided to bury his reputation on Sunday morning, the commentariat found itself resurrecting it before sunset. The resentments, the accusations and counteraccusations, the deeply entrenched hatred and suspicions: all were paused.
Among those expressing sympathy was Donald Trump.
“Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis,” he wrote. “We extend our warmest best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”
A rare and entirely unexpected gust of warm civility swept through US political life on a sleepy Washington Sunday.
Nobody expected it to last for long.
