I don’t know how much there was or was not a cover-up, but what I don’t understand is if there was, why didn’t someone leak it for their own personal/political gain? Certainly Kamala had everything to gain by getting it out much earlier - heck she very likely could be POTUS today if it was widely known prior. Also, all the other potential candidates - Pete, Newsom, etc had significant benefit to gain if it was known earlier enough to cause a primary.
And even the news agencies - they had eyeballs to sell - Pulitzer prizes to win. Sure, they might have a liberal bias but it doesn’t override their own bias toward their bottom line and there is no way that I would believe that all three networks and the vast majority of the cable news networks all conspired, against their own self interest, to keep such quiet.
All that leads me to believe there wasn’t as much of a cover-up as we are being lead to believe. Let’s be honest, the dems are not very good at keeping such secrets and Biden lacked the political capital, unlike Trump, in being able to bully people to silence.
Maybe I should clarify. I’m not suggesting this is the most scandalous cover-up, it was the most poorly executed. How can we honestly say that it was so scandalous when everybody and their mom knew there was a problem…including the majority of voters?
Crime against the this republic seems a little dramatic to describe this situation. We can say a lot of people were too afraid to say or do anything…that seems to be a very contagious problem.
Some disingenuous Ds will use the “cover-up” to explain their inaction. Many dishonest Rs will use this “scandal” to provide cover for their wart of a leader.
Thanks Van. Your bloviating about this crime against the republic will certainly shield the many others that are occurring each and every day under the current regime.
From the Washington Post’s review of Original Sin:
‘Original Sin’ indicts the ‘cover-up’ of a steeply declining Joe Biden https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/05/14/original-sin-joe-biden-jake-tapper-alex-thompson-review/ 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. For years, they denied the president had any issues and kept him away from a public that had long since concluded that he was too old for the job. It worked for an astonishingly long time, until, very suddenly, it didn’t.
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. “The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for re-election,” Tapper and Thompson write, “followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.”…
How Biden, Harris and the Democratic Party got there is a more complicated story…Biden was almost never confronted with evidence that he was faltering or that the public had determined he was unfit for the presidency. Biden’s family and a group of loyal aides who Tapper and Thompson call “the Politburo” were singularly devoted to the belief that Biden was uniquely capable of leading the country, and they went to great lengths to limit the president’s access to negative information to sustain it. The result was a political environment in which those who challenged the president’s standing, such as then-Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota), who mounted a quixotic primary campaign, were ostracized and a media environment in which few reporters were willing to question the president’s fitness for office.
My guess is summed up in three words: Orange Man Bad. Those inside felt that even a diminished Biden was better than Trump. (In fact, upthread we have a poster who still thinks it would be better if Biden had won re-election.) Most of the media was willing to go along with the gaslighting because they too knew that Orange. Man. Bad.
That’s not enough - and it isn’t a “better than Trump” scenario - it is a “better than I” scenario.
In other words, that might be enough for people like his Chief of Staff Jeff Zients (who has no apparent POTUS ambition) but not for anyone else in the dem party that wanted to be POTUS, like Pete, Newsom or Harris. And, it isn’t as if they needed to be on record - they could have simply been the leak to Tapper - but two years ago instead of after.
All this MIGHT be different if Biden was well loved by the Dem party but he wasn’t. He also didn’t wield massive political power that made people afraid of him.
For the sake of argument, I will even grant you that most of them might have chosen to stay silent, but certainly not all. Their loyalty to themselves is higher than any loyalty (or antipathy) they feel for a candidate - their resent behavior in capitulating to Trump is a great illustration of just now little loyalty (or antipathy) they feel when the choice is ideology or money.
Which is fine; I suspect you are not so happy with Tapper’s conclusion that Biden’s decision to run again (and preclude open Dem primaries) led to Trump’s re-election.
The past is our main source of crucial knowledge, no?
The cover up of Biden’s decline was catastrophically dangerous and reveals, on top of all Trump’s staggering dangers, an even deepr and too long too successfully hidden rot in the lack of public oversight of the White House.
There’s the real problem. All this repeated talk of “cover-up” is a cover-up of the clear and present danger currently in the White House.
Reminds me of the people who wouldn’t vote for Harris because there wasn’t a primary for her selection. Sure we can talk about parliamentary procedure, robert’s rules, and cover-ups, but it was a binary decision; her or Project 2025.
That’s me! I’m not alone. It wasn’t just those inside. There were many, many people who understood Biden was diminished, and would have still voted for him. Some might call it TDS, I call it moral clarity.
I totally agree with Tapper’s conclusion. I even wrote to Biden expressing how disappointed I was that he betrayed his promise to be a transition president. While it’s impossible to know, had Biden chosen to not run, I believe the Ds would have won the election. In my opinion, this will be the biggest stain on his presidency. Probably an orange stain…those are tough to get out.
Hopefully we learn how dangerous it is for a president to be surrounded by “yes” people, who will not do the right thing. Compared to our current status, the Biden administration’s failings look like child’s play.
Speaking of Child’s Play, I just read that Chucky was appointed to head up the Administration for Children and Families (ACF).
For informed voters, yes! There aren’t too many of those living in the US.
Many didn’t know anything about Project 2025. Many believed TFG when he said he didn’t know what it was. For a dude completely unfamiliar with Project 2025, he’s been extremely successful at executing the plan.
And in the GOP there are people who knew Trump’s true mental and physical condition as well. But rather than saying nothing, they actively lied about it, too afraid to disagree with Trump’s own lies.
I’ve said it elsewhere, the brouhaha over Tapper’s new book by those on the right is nothing more than an attempt to distract the public from their own commission of the same kind of coverup and lying.
