A reckoning with a fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.
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.'
