It is a quadrennial exercise anxiously anticipated by political insiders and those wanting to know what really happened during the last presidential campaign. Months after Election Day, multiple books are released detailing the inside story of the race for the White House. Author Theodore White started the trend with The Making of the President 1960 and subsequent volumes about the next three presidential elections. Others have since picked up the ball and run with it. Three books taking readers inside the Biden world during the unforgettable election of 2024 have hit the shelves, and they share one basic conclusion: Joe Biden has cost the Democratic Party dearly, perhaps for a generation.
Anyone paying attention to his public appearances had to realize something was very wrong with the 46th president. Between his debate with Trump, when he appeared dazed and confused, uttering the infamous “we beat Medicare,” freezing up at a Juneteenth celebration, and experiencing repeated bouts of incoherence for all the world to see, one is left to wonder just how vulnerable the country had become. It got so bad that after the former president was forcibly removed from the race by fellow Democrats but refused to resign, first lady Jill Biden was forced to conduct a Cabinet meeting; convicted felon Hunter Biden had become his father’s principal adviser and Praetorian Guard throughout his final weeks in office. But those are facts of which we were already aware. The inside story is even more chilling.
As Biden’s cognitive decline became alarmingly apparent, his tight circle of advisers closed ranks, denying the obvious, claiming he was a different man in private than in public, “sharp as a tack,” engaged, and, as Joe Scarborough famously declared on MSNBC, the best-ever version of himself. But now we know just how fictitious that truly was. In fact, his behavior behind closed doors was just as, if not even more, distressing. As we suspected all along, it took a cover-up of biblical proportions by Biden’s allies and complicit media to deny what they knew to be true.
Talk About Chutzpah
Perhaps most remarkable is that one of the books, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, was co-authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who was prominent among those who failed – or refused – to report on Biden’s decline even as he was well aware of it. But now, in an apparent attempt to recover some of his bygone credibility, Tapper writes as if he never participated in the de facto conspiracy of silence by big media. Give Tapper this: He is not lacking in chutzpah. The blurb for the book states, “In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy … [Biden], his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.”
In Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, author Chris Whipple writes that Ron Klain, who acted as a campaign adviser after serving as Biden’s chief of staff for the first two years of his presidency, viewed the president as “out of it” and even “half-seriously” worried that Biden thought he was “president of NATO.” As he prepared Biden for the debate that signaled the de facto death knell for his presidency, Klain says Biden “didn’t really understand what his argument was on inflation” and “had nothing to say about a second term other than finish the job.” Seeing Biden worn to the bone from foreign travel in the run-up to the debate, Klain “was startled. He’d never seen [Biden] so exhausted and out of it. Biden was unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. Halfway through the session, the president excused himself and went off to sit by the pool.” On other occasions, Biden would arrive for an event and just sit by himself in The Beast (the presidential limousine) for several minutes, staring blankly into the middle distance.
The book details how aides to Vice President Kamala Harris were worried enough that they "strategized around the possibility that Biden might die in office" and compiled a “death-pool roster” of federal judges who could swear in Harris if Biden passed away. Whipple says, “I happen to think that to call it a ‘cover-up’ is simplistic. I think it was stranger and way more troubling than that. Biden’s inner circle, his closest advisers, many of them were in a fog of delusion and denial. They believed what they wanted to believe.”
In the book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes write that a number of top Democrats were convinced of Biden’s perilous decline before his fateful debate with Trump. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) – whose endorsement revived Biden’s flagging campaign in 2020 – Biden adviser Anita Dunn, Al Sharpton, and major donor John Morgan were among those who girded their loins for disaster in Biden’s one-on-one with Trump. Thus, they each decided to watch the debate privately so they would not have to react publicly.
What We Still Don’t Know About the Fall of Biden
While these books reveal many of the gory details surrounding the Biden and Harris campaigns, we may never know who was really calling the shots for the four years of the Biden administration. We may never discover with certainty who orchestrated the campaign of legal warfare against Trump or just how prominent a role Jill Biden played in her husband’s decision to run for re-election. Some things will be left to idle or informed speculation.
Meanwhile, other books about the campaign, more focused on Trump, have also been published, including 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by Josh Dawsey; The Greatest Comeback Ever: Inside Trump's Big Beautiful Campaign by Joe Concha; and All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America by Michael Wolff. They chronicle how Trump was convicted of felonies, miraculously survived one assassination attempt, sidestepped another, and pulled off a comeback once considered unthinkable, a story for the ages by itself.
But Trump’s comeback was made possible by the insistence of a deeply addled Biden to seek a second term. What happened next will forever be remembered as arguably not just the greatest cover-up in American history but one we all witnessed in real time. It was the quintessential act of gaslighting, as those who surrounded Biden futilely attempted to convince Americans that what we were seeing was an illusion. It ultimately forced Democrats to turn to a certified loser in Kamala Harris and brought their party to its knees, likely for many years to come.
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