The result of more than 200 interviews, the book is a damning account of an elderly, egotistical president shielded from reality by a slavish coterie of loyalists and family members united by a shared, seemingly ironclad sense of denial and a determination to smear anyone who dared to question the president’s fitness for office as a threat to the republic covertly working on behalf of Trump ... Of the many virtues of Original Sin, the greatest is its stubborn focus on Biden’s health as not just the most important factor in the 2024 election but the sole defining reason for Trump’s victory ... Original Sin is not really a 'campaign book'—its account of the 2024 election largely ends after Biden drops out—but its simple assessment of the race is more compelling than anything else I’ve read about it ... Original Sin is rarely better than when Tapper and Thompson are writing—with extensive reporting and clear-eyed prose—about the disaster that Biden caused ... Over the next year, dozens of books will appear that attempt to explain this election. It’s hard to imagine any doing better than that.
The result is a damning, step-by-step account of how the people closest to a stubborn, aging president enabled his quixotic resolve to run for a second term ... Blistering.
The book recounts some notable moments, but what it mainly offers is a slow burn ... While Original Sin doesn’t provide some single sensational reveal, it sheds light on official deception ... Readers should take with grains of salt the wording of fly-on-the-wall quotes that appear without so much as an attribution like 'according to,' or a source 'recalled hearing.' Nowhere in the book do the authors acknowledge that the dialogue appearing between quotation marks might have been spun or exaggerated by sources eager to make themselves look good or others look bad ... Perhaps the most noteworthy sentence in Original Sin is this one about Kamala Harris: 'The issue that she truly and most strongly disagreed with the president on behind closed doors was Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.'
To their credit, [Thompson and Tapper] do little editorializing. The book is written not unlike an autopsy report, describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail ... Perhaps the most striking aspect of Original Sin is how ...dozens of people in Biden’s orbit suspected that he was not physically or mentally equipped to be the president of the United States, yet they helped him seek that office and keep it when he couldn’t reliably perform its duties.
Superbly reported ... Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids ... In the end, I’m not convinced there was a coordinated campaign to hide the truth about Biden’s 'condition,' but maybe that doesn’t matter ... Original Sin is not a compassionate account of Biden’s last campaign—at times it’s even a painful, if necessary, piece of journalism.
New and intimate accounts by his staffers reveal that the president’s inner circle conducted a cover-up of his faltering mental acuity as early as 2023 ... Provide[s] a more detailed picture of the chaos endemic to the end of Biden’s tenure.
A book that strives to serve up a tell-all account of President Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical 'decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.' Mr. Tapper, the chief Washington correspondent for CNN, and Mr. Thompson, a national political correspondent for Axios, put together their story in the manner of a jigsaw, talking to 200 interlocutors, including White House and campaign insiders ... The completed picture is one with which most Americans are already familiar
Exhaustively reported ... Original Sin does not offer a comprehensive assessment of how Mr. Biden’s governance decisions were affected or changed by his decline. The book also does not reflect on criticism of the U.S. media from both political camps for their handling of the issue—did reporters fail to dig deep enough into Mr. Biden’s decline or did they overplay it relative to Mr. Trump’s erratic behaviour? And while the authors touch on the history of presidential health and secrecy, they don’t delve much into this context ... The book’s structure is also loose. Some sections read as a marathon series of insider anecdotes, seemingly driven by a desire to include as much information as possible even after the authors have ably proven their thesis ... These writing choices are probably more by design than flaw, fitting with a current subgenre of Washington insider book, in which the objective is to reconstruct as many backroom scenes as possible and publish them quickly. Still, a reader not already invested in the subject matter may find it repetitive ... Either way, Original Sin both asks and answers troubling questions about health and the world‘s most powerful political office. And it creates a highly detailed historical record along the way.
