By Jim Geraghty
Friday, May 23, 2025
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Big Beautiful Bill” this week, 215 to 214. (One
House Republican was in Washington but missed the vote, and another reportedly slept through the vote.)
Getting the bill through the House was always going to be
one of the toughest steps of the process. It’s not like there wasn’t plenty of
criticism of the bill from Democrats and in the mainstream media in the past
week, but in the end, it couldn’t dissuade enough House Republicans. You have
to wonder whether the news cycle of this week would have been different if it
hadn’t aligned with the release of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s much-hyped
book, Original Sin — punctuated by the shocking news that former President Biden was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate
cancer.
Our Audrey Fahlberg has an excellent and fair-minded review of Original Sin,
and our Jeff Blehar notes, “The one aspect of the conspiracy
surrounding Joe Biden’s health that it fails to adequately address (beyond
scattered mentions in the author’s note and elsewhere) is the media’s role in
facilitating the conspiracy for four years.”
A lot of conservatives are angry at Jake Tapper, and it’s
hard to begrudge them. (Tapper told Megyn Kelly, “Knowing what I know now,
obviously I feel tremendous humility about my coverage.”)
Still, let’s give Tapper and Thompson a little credit for
spotting a huge, under-reported and under-discussed story that a lot of
Democrats would prefer to leave in the rear-view mirror, and choosing to
co-write a major book about it.
For the past few decades, we’ve seen a recurring pattern
where a major narrative in the mainstream media turns out to be false — Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot,” in Ferguson,
Mo.; the lab leak wasn’t a crazy conspiracy theory; the Hunter Biden laptop is real and isn’t “Russian disinformation”;
an exhaustive investigation by Robert Mueller “did not find
that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated
with the Russian government”; police shootings of unarmed black men are relatively rare;
and so on. And after these massive shots to the credibility of the mainstream
media, there are murmurs of “we must do better” and then almost everyone
involved completely forgets about it, setting the table for the next egregious
triumph of the preferred narrative over the facts.
Credit Tapper for at least wanting to dwell on the fact
that everyone around Joe Biden tried to keep a doddering old man in the Oval
Office for another four years.
A lot of what’s covered in the book isn’t new, and you’ll
remember the Biden tripping over the sandbag at the U.S. Air Force Academy,
Robert Hur’s report, the failed and tone-deaf pitch for “Bidenomics” when
Americans were struggling with inflation and the cost of living, and Biden’s
insistence in his debate with Trump that abortion needed to remain legal because young women were being raped by their sisters. As
the authors declare early, “This isn’t hindsight, everyone saw it happening.”
(You may not recall the audiotape of Joe Biden talking to
his sister Val and ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in McLean, Va., in 2017
declaring, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” which dispels
any doubt that Joe Biden knew he had classified information in his home and
discussed them with others. Biden’s Department of Justice was prosecuting Trump
for the same actions on a larger scale.)
What is new is the Democrats confessing to their sins and
crimes during the Biden presidency. It’s the details that make the book a
compelling, quick read. For example, we all knew Democrats were panicked while
watching Biden’s debate, but it’s fun to know that at a Biden campaign watch
party in Los Angeles, an enraged Rob Reiner turned to Doug Emhoff and yelled,
“We’re going to lose our f***ing democracy because of you!”
Every conservative argued that Biden’s “basement
campaign” during Covid was partially designed to hide how old and incoherent he
had become. Now it can be told that a slew of videos taped for the 2020
convention were deemed unusable, as Biden “couldn’t follow the conversation at
all.” Biden’s declining abilities were glaringly obvious from his first years
in office; in two meetings on Capitol Hill in 2021, Biden rambles so
incomprehensibly that congressional Democrats are unsure what the point of the
meeting was. In 2022, Tony Blinken had to remind the president of why he was
meeting with a foreign leader.
Curiously, Afghanistan gets only the most cursory
mention; apparently I’m the only person in the world who cares that during his
infamously short-tempered interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden insisted
that no one had recommended keeping a small group of U.S. troops in Afghanistan
to keep order at the airport or anywhere else, specifically stating, “No one
said that to me, that I can recall.” A few months later, under oath before the
Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Central Command General Frank McKenzie
and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley both said they had recommended President Biden maintain
2,500 troops in Afghanistan. Was Biden lying, or had he reached the point where
he couldn’t remember what he had been told in briefings?
By the end of 2022, Biden was forgetting the names of
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Communications Director Kate
Bedingfield, and the president’s speechwriters had adapted to a once infamously
garrulous man who now found speaking a chore. “Everything got shorter:
speeches, paragraphs, even sentences. The vocabulary shrank . . . they were
slowly adapting to Biden’s shrinking capacities.”
By September 2023, Biden was at a Manhattan fundraiser,
telling the donors the exact same story twice in a span of three minutes. That
fall, he didn’t recognize DNC chairman Jaime Harrison, and Virginia Senator
Mark Warner ended a phone call with Biden concluding that the president had no
idea what was going on in his own counterterrorism policy. At a cabinet meeting
that was likely the one held October 2, 2023, a cabinet secretary described
Biden as “disoriented” and “out of it,” mouth agape.
For those wondering where the vice president was during
all this, Biden dismissively referred to Harris as “a work in progress” and her
staff mixed up the terms “astronomy” and “astrology.” Apparently, no one in the
Biden team believed Harris was capable of adequately performing the duties of
the presidency,
Early on, the authors quote “someone close to the family”
on the Biden family’s dynamics:
The Bidens’ greatest strength is
living in their own reality. And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau
isn’t going to die. Hunter’s sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth.
Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition. They stick to the
narrative and repeat it.
This is declaring that the family’s greatest strength is
that they’re delusional and in denial about glaringly obvious problems with
serious consequences. If I said that to you about a family I knew, you wouldn’t
think they were beautiful and loving, you would think that they were on a
course for disaster.
Original Sin reaffirms what many conservatives
believed. First, the Bidens are terrible people — selfish, arrogant, lying to
themselves and others, oblivious to the predictable and likely consequences of
their actions, incapable of separating their personal interest from the
country’s best interest. They are the pinnacle of American power and privilege
but always see themselves as victims. They talk a lot about duty and honor and
country, but put themselves first, every single time, and cashed in on Biden’s
powerful positions relentlessly. Hunter Biden’s crimes are well known;
conservatives likely know about Hunter’s affair with his brother’s widow,
Hallie, but don’t know that Hunter Biden got Hallie addicted to crack cocaine
as well. We learn that the president’s daughter Ashley Biden also “struggled
with addiction for years” and relapsed when she learned that her father
intended to run for president again. When Biden turned in his terrible debate
performance, the family blamed everyone except the president and themselves for
expecting him to do something he was no longer mentally or physically capable
of doing.
The narrative of Biden as this lovable, old-fashioned
ice-cream eating patriarch of a family out of a Norman Rockwell painting was
never all that plausible, and any reporter who played along with that spin
effort ought to hang his head in shame. It likely fed the family’s delusions
that they were the heroes of a great American story, ones whose righteousness
justified any misdeed, and who had to hold on to their political power at any
cost.
The second reaffirmed conservative belief is that the
Bidens, and seemingly every top staffer around them, are astonishingly stupid
people. By February 2024, 86 percent of Americans believed Biden was too old to serve
another term. (For perspective, 86 percent was George W. Bush’s job approval number in the Pew
Research survey after 9/11.) The task wasn’t merely to hide Biden’s
decline, because Americans had already noticed; it was to refute it
sufficiently to convince Americans that Biden could keep doing a job that he
clearly was doing part-time at most. Large stretches of the Biden presidency
and campaign were an effort to minimize the amount of time anyone saw or heard
from the president. Through the early months of 2024, the Biden campaign’s high
command debated whether Biden could get away with refusing to debate Trump.
Did the Biden team think the president could disappear
and the American people just weren’t going to notice?
Also note that by February 2024, Biden’s political
advisers contemplated having Biden undergo a cognitive exam to dispel the
increasingly loud questions about his mental health and acuity. Biden’s
personal doctor, Kevin O’Connor, argued against giving Biden one, insisting
that he saw the president frequently and never saw any reason for concern.
O’Connor’s contention that there was never any reason for concern simply does
not align with all the other stories in this book.
Even if the Democrats had somehow carried Biden over the
finish line — Weekend at Bernie’s-style — they would have been stuck
with an 82-year-old president whose condition was declining rapidly and, who we
now know, was about to get a grim diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. As Charlie Cooke observed earlier this week, whether it was
ever spoken aloud or not, the plan was for Joe Biden to die in office. And then
the country would be stuck with acting president Kamala Harris, who the Biden
team had done everything possible to keep away from the Oval Office because they
had so little faith in her.
Finally, it’s become almost pro forma for Democrats to
say things like, “I’m really proud of President Biden’s legislative
accomplishments, but he should have pledged to serve one term.”
Those legislative accomplishments are primarily $4
trillion in spending bills that set off a runaway inflationary cycle that took
about two years to pass and that appears to have permanently altered the cost
of living in America. Biden managed to leave immigration law enforcement
weakened knowing he was likely to have a rematch with Trump; he talked tough on
Putin but couldn’t deter the invasion and slow-walked the military aid to Ukraine; and by January,
outgoing Secretary of State Antony Blinken was frustrated enough to acknowledge that
every time Biden showed daylight between his position and Israel’s, Hamas
walked away from the negotiating table. On his way out the door, Biden proved
once again he didn’t care about his past promises or the rule of law with an egregiously unjustifiable pardon
spree. Tapper and Thompson close their book by reminding readers of a Biden
promise from an interview in 2020: “And so I guarantee you, I guarantee you, I
will be totally transparent in terms of my health and all aspects of my
health.”
Joe Biden was a disastrous president, so disastrous that
even a president with as many glaring flaws and scandals as Donald Trump could
complete the most improbable comeback in American political history.
ADDENDA: In case you missed it yesterday, even
though it proved so much more expensive than expected that the program had to
be canceled in his state, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker still thinks it’s a good idea for the government to
pay for the health care of illegal immigrants.
A Corner post from Wednesday included an error; the
National Conference of State Legislatures website is incorrect, and a special
election for the vacancy created by the death of Virginia Representative Gerry
Connolly is not required within 60 days. When asked if there was any deadline
or timetable under the law, Andrea Gaines, the external affairs manager of the
Virginia Department of Elections responded, “At this time, we do not have any
additional information to provide other than referencing the Code of Virginia.”
Those of us in the eleventh district of Virginia are
going to get a special election scheduled soon, right, Governor Glenn Youngkin?
You’re not going to try to pull that stunt that Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Michigan
Governor Gretchen Whitmer did, right?
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