My Review of 'Original Sin'
The new book from Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson covers up the media's role in the Biden decline cover up.
Sorry, all, know I haven’t been good about writing — been a busy few months, with a couple more coming up — but I wanted to be sure those who were interested saw my review in Commonplace of Original Sin, the new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson. Link to the piece is here: https://commonplace.org/2025/05/29/the-medias-original-sin/
While the book purports to investigate the cover up of former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline (something I’ve been shouting about both here and across the Atlantic a few times) it leaves out a vital participant: the media, which worked for years to deceive American voters about Biden’s acuity.
A very charitable reading is that perhaps the authors just failed to appreciate their own trade’s role in what happened. I think the more plausible is that they’re getting a head-start on disappearing the press’s former coverage directly down the memory hole. But you be the judge.
Original Sin… recounts the cover up of Biden’s undoing told through the stories of those closest to him, dating back to before he ran and won the presidency in 2020.
The book is a dishy tell-all, a Beltway drama about what went on behind closed doors in and around the White House. How could someone so incapacitated seek a second term in the Oval Office? Who let things get so bad? “Everyone saw it happening,” the authors note, and recognized that what was happening with Biden “wasn’t normal.” Why wasn’t it stopped?
The authors seem to ask these questions as if they’re as confused as anyone who saw Biden on that fateful debate stage in June 2024. But that narrative ignores a key element of the cover-up: the role of the mainstream media they’re both leading voices in.