The Wages of Hubris

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

 

Among the tell-alls that purport to reveal the full extent of the worst-kept secret in Washington over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin might have been the most anticipated. To survey the reaction to its excerpts, it won’t disappoint.

 

Today, Axios revealed that Biden’s aides privately discussed contingencies in the highly unlikely event that the former president won reelection, including parking him in a wheelchair if need be. That detail isn’t especially surprising given the president’s rapid and unignorable deterioration. What is interesting is that the former president’s defenders are still trying to recoup the reputational investments they lost when they committed themselves to lying to the public about Biden’s condition.

 

“Throughout 2024, Biden aides told reporters that the president’s halting walk was partly the result of him fracturing his foot in November 2020, and then refusing to consistently wear his walking boot,” Axios’s report read. “In short, they said, Biden was being undone by his own vigor.” That’s not what Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, found. By early 2021, the president’s physician related that the “small fractures” in the president’s foot “are completely healed” without complications.

 

This grating little vignette is illustrative of the problem that plagued Democrats throughout Biden’s term — a problem that the former president’s declining physical and mental health only catalyzed. We all saw with our own eyes Biden tripping over sandbags, falling down the stairs leading to Air Force One (and, eventually, using a shorter staircase to an alternative entrance onto the presidential aircraft), and wearing orthopedic sneakers designed to prevent slips and falls. The former president keeled over sideways on a stationary bicycle for all the world to see. Despite all this, Democrats believed themselves such deft manipulators of public perception that they thought they could convince us that Biden was just too sprightly.

 

The truth of Biden’s condition might not have been buttressed by multiple supporting quotes and deep investigative reporting — not, at least, until after the 2022 midterms. But the obvious fact of Biden’s decrepitude ensured that there would be a market at least for reporting on Biden’s condition eventually. That market niche is being filled today to the point of saturation. But Biden’s defenders had to know it was coming. They still mortgaged their credibility, perhaps operating on the perfectly understandable (and entirely sordid) belief that a journalistic omertà would protect them. That supposition would have to rest on the presumption that journalists, like the president’s aides, were all on the same team — they shared ideological objectives, political goals, and social circles. Why wouldn’t the press carry water for their friends and allies in the White House into perpetuity?

 

As is often the case with Democrats, the president’s defenders failed to appreciate the profit motive. For some reason, they didn’t foresee a time when professional incentives would overcome partisanship, and Democrats tempted fate at every turn. They insisted that the president’s only ailment was a childhood stutter. They insisted that Biden’s staff “couldn’t keep up with him,” that evidence of his penchant for directionless meandering in public settings were“cheap fakes” contrived into existence by the president’s enemies. Then, when confronted with their lies — all of which are on the record — they insist, “We didn’t.”

 

If it was ever scrupulously observed, the omertà is gone now. Axios’s own report reveals the extent to which Biden’s few remaining defenders now feel wholly exposed insofar as it relies on quotes from current Biden aides who nevertheless declined to be named in this report.

 

Biden wasn’t the cause of the public’s current mistrust of the Democratic Party and its elected officials. Rather, it was the party’s unfounded assumption that it was so competent, that reporters were so pliant, and that you were so stupid that the president’s party could craft and promulgate its own preferred reality. Republicans should never let their opponents live it down.