We can demand accountability from Biden's handlers and still question Jake Tapper's ethics

Tapper kept up his plans to promote his new book about Biden's cognitive state even after Biden's cancer diagnosis. That’s not okay, even if Biden’s handlers have some explaining to do.

Jake Tapper hawking his book (screenshot via CNN)

Let’s be clear. A lot of people in Joe Biden’s inner circle have a lot of explaining to do, in short order. In the last month, two books have been published about the events that led to Biden abandoning his bid for a second term. Namely, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, and Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It is now clear that several members of Biden’s inner circle knew Biden did not have the stamina or mental acuity to run for a second term. What is more, they knew as early as 2022.

Unfortunately, the latest book, Original Sin, now stands tainted. Two days before it was published, Biden was diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer. And yet, Tapper maintained a busy schedule of interviews—including on his own network, CNN—as if nothing happened. To his credit, he expressed condolences to the Biden family in an interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air.” But common human decency demanded that interview, and every other interview, be postponed out of respect for Biden and his family.

Tapper was already under fire from Democrats for pushing this book even as Donald Trump’s return to the White House has seen Trump’s deranged criminality on full display. Unfortunately, it’s giving a lot of people on the blue team cover to deny a hard truth. In the name of upholding Biden’s reputation, those around him potentially did irreparable damage to it by engaging in catastrophic hubris.

That much was established before Original Sin was published. According to an excerpt of Fight published in The Guardian in March, Biden had already declined to the point that party officials were making plans for Biden’s withdrawal as early as 2023. According to another excerpt, also around this time, former Vice President Kamala Harris’s communications chief, Jamal Harris, and several other Harris aides were taking steps—without Harris’ knowledge—to prepare for the prospect of Biden dying in office. In the most gut-wrenching anecdote of all, two days after the now-infamous debate on June 27, Biden attended a reception hosted by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. By then, his aides were so concerned that they taped florescent tape to the carpet “that showed the leader of the free world where to walk.”

Despite this, according to Allen and Parnes, Biden’s inner circle, made up mostly of people “dependent on him for their living,” created an environment in which “pushback could be construed as disloyalty.” In another excerpt, probably the most damning of all, that mentality persisted even after the now-infamous debate on June 27. In response to concerns about how confused and disoriented Biden looked on stage, Biden aides told alarmed donors via text and on the phone that they were putting their own agenda ahead of that of the party and the country.

In hindsight, this sounds like next-level gaslighting. But this mentality seems to have been corroborated in Original Sin. Tapper and Thompson focus heavily on a group of close advisers known as “the politburo,” helmed by longtime advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, who walled off access to Biden and snuffed out concerns about his growing limitations.

For instance, Donilon and Ricchetti never passed on concerns from Senate Democrats about the now-infamous debate. I had wondered why Biden hadn’t done anything to help his field commanders on Capitol Hill defend him. Now I know why. As Chris Cillizza puts it, Donilon and Ricchetti “cared more about keeping Biden in power (and protecting their access to that power)” than anything else.

But according to The New York Times, that isn’t the most outrageous anecdote. By far, the most venal member of this cabal has to be then-First Lady Jill Biden’s top adviser, Anthony Bernal. Reportedly, Bernal only needed to say “Jill isn’t going to like this” in order to instantly silence any concerns about Biden’s mental acuity. If Bernal cared one iota about Jill’s feelings, he would have kept his damned mouth shut.

According to Tapper and Thompson, Biden’s decline had become acute as early as 2022, leading his handlers to keep his speeches short and have him use the shorter staircase to Air Force One. Reportedly, it had progressed to the point that by 2023, his staff was compressing his schedule to the midday hours.

The obvious question—why did they do this? From where I’m sitting, the conclusion from both books is equally obvious. Biden’s handlers wanted Biden to take the credit for delivering a knockout blow to Trumpism. Indeed, that was the argument made for clearing the primary field for Biden in 2024—with the GOP united behind Trump, a contested primary risked Biden being bloodied in the same manner that Jimmy Carter was bloodied by Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge in 1980.

I accepted that argument, as did a lot of others who, like me, ultimately supported Biden after supporting others in the 2020 primary—in my case, first Julian Castro, then Amy Klobuchar. Our initial concerns about Biden’s age gave way once Trump announced he was running again. The prospect of Trump essentially having the stage to himself while the Democrats fought it out for most of the summer was too much to bear.

But that assumed Biden was in a condition to run again. It is now clear that a lot of people close to Biden knew that he wasn’t. It’s equally clear that they told themselves no one with actual scruples would discover it. In the age of smartphones and social media, that’s horribly unrealistic.

Right-wingers have been whining for some time that it should have been obvious Biden was not in any condition to run again. But have they considered, even for a minute, that while there may have been bits and pieces to suggest this, they didn’t add up to the extraordinary evidence required to support an extraordinary claim? Yes, the smaller number of press conferences and unscripted appearances may have raised eyebrows in and of themselves. But there was at least a good-faith explanation for it—until the debate.

As we now know, George Clooney recalled seeing Biden wasn’t his normal self at a fundraiser three weeks before the debate, and tried to tell himself it was a one-off. It was only after seeing the debate that he realized it wasn’t. Congressman Seth Moulton, who represents many of Boston’s northern suburbs, was of a similar mind. The debate performance reminded him too much of what happened weeks ago at Normandy, when Biden didn’t recognize him. It was that moment that pulled the scales off my eyes and made me realize that Biden couldn’t continue.

I know from experience of what it takes to find out whether there is really evidence of a cover-up. Many of my longtime friends and readers know that in my freshman year at Carolina, I was chewed up and spit out by a hypercharismatic and borderline cultish campus ministry, Waymaker Christian Fellowship. Early in my sophomore year, I accidentally discovered that their church in Durham, King’s Park International Church, had once been the Carolina chapter of a notorious “campus cult” from the 1970s and 1980s, Maranatha Campus Ministries. However, KPIC’s longtime pastor, Ron Lewis, never saw fit to disclose that little detail.

I thought that when I told my former “brothers” and “sisters” about this deceit, they would walk out on that church, causing it to collapse like a barstool that had one leg sawed off. But they didn’t. It was the reaction of Waymaker’s lead campus minister at the time, Perry Burkholder, that alarmed me the most. The condescending manner in which he dismissed what I told him, especially since he doubled as KPIC’s youth pastor, led me to wonder if he and Waymaker’s other campus ministers had known the truth all along.

But there were two very big reasons why this was unlikely. Just after my freshman year, Perry had married a recently-graduated senior who was in Waymaker, Danielle Arsenault. Early in my sophomore year, another campus minister, Morgan Bates, was engaged to one of my fellow sophomores in Waymaker, Loretta Tyson. In order to believe Perry and Morgan had known about KPIC’s Maranatha past before I told them, I would have had to believe that Perry hid it from Danielle until they started getting serious. Ditto for Morgan and Loretta.

The Waymakers were tightly knit to the point of being enmeshed, so I got to know Danielle and Loretta fairly well. Nothing I had seen from my interactions with Danielle and Loretta that would suggest they would have reacted any differently from most other women when their men hide something this critical from them. There was another factor to consider—Loretta’s parents. I suspected that they were cut from a similar stripe as my mother, though it was clear they had raised her pretty conservatively. This was a black woman from Charleston who voted for Strom Thurmond in what would be his last run for Senate, for God’s sake. However, they valued education, and spent a pretty penny sending Loretta out of state. Even without that to consider, no parent with any kind of love for their daughter, no matter how fundified they were, would tolerate a man putting said daughter in harm’s way. In order to believe there was a cover-up, I would have had to believe that Morgan would have been willing to risk Loretta’s parents blowing the lid on KPIC.

Now, by this time, I despised the Waymakers as much as elements of the right despise Biden—or any Democratic president, for that matter. But unlike these right-wingers, I wasn’t willing to allow my outrage to blind me to the facts. And those facts did not support a cover-up. Indeed, they supported a more vanilla scenario—one that still made the Waymakers look awful. As near as I have been able to determine, the Waymakers learned about Pastor Ron’s deceit when I told them—and they had done absolutely nothing. It took me several years to prove it. But I was determined to get to the truth, no matter how vanilla it looked. Likewise, it’s very likely that Tapper and Thompson—and before then, Allen and Parnes—had bits and pieces about Biden’s condition for some time, but not nearly enough to claim that he wasn’t fit to run again.

However, Tapper deserves to be pilloried for putting his desire to gin up book sales over common human decency. In the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, the only honorable course would have been to postpone the tour out of respect for Biden and his family. Even if you accept that Biden shouldn’t have run again, it’s only fair to ask whether Tapper is seeking justice or revenge.

As it stands now, this situation has parallels with how Caleb Hannan handled his investigation into Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the inventor of an unusual golf club. While writing for ESPN’s Grantland, Hannan discovered evidence that showed Vanderbilt had lied about her credentials. She wasn’t related to the Vanderbilt family, she never worked on the B-2 stealth bomber, she never did undergrad work at MIT or Penn, and didn’t have an MBA from Penn’s Wharton School. When he revealed this to Vanderbilt’s investors, he also revealed that he’d also discovered Vanderbilt was trans. Even worse, he wrote the story in a manner that conflated Vanderbilt’s embellishment of her credentials with her decision to stay in the closet. Vanderbilt committed suicide shortly before the article went live.

Amid the spectacle of a con artist being made a sympathetic figure, ESPN apologized a few days later. More seriously, Hannan’s egregious lapse of ethics and judgment derailed any chance of Vanderbilt’s investors getting justice, either through a lawsuit for securities fraud or a criminal prosecution. As damning as the evidence against Vanderbilt was, it was gleaned by a reporter who found it acceptable to out her. No federal prosecutor or private securities lawyer with an iota of decency would have wanted it on their conscience that they brought a case built primarily on outing—even if there was no doubt that Vanderbilt had lied to investors about her credentials.

This situation with Tapper is no different. We may be at the point that his book is so tainted by ethical lapses on his part that whether it’s true is irrelevant. And that’s a shame, because a lot of people need to answer for not giving us the truth about whether Biden was fit to run. And more importantly, they need to answer for not giving Biden’s family the truth.