A new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson offers a grim but unsurprising look behind the curtain of President Joe Biden’s now-infamous June 2024 debate performance—an event widely recognized as the fatal blow to his re-election campaign. What the authors document, however, is not a last-minute stumble by an aging politician. It is the culmination of years of concealment, wishful thinking, and institutional complicity.
According to Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, former White House chief of staff Ron Klain was blindsided when he discovered that Biden had not reviewed the prep materials prepared for the high-stakes debate against Donald Trump. Upon arriving at Camp David—supposedly for intensive rehearsal—Biden spent the first day sleeping. The book notes that his routine continued to involve “lots of naps” and erratic mock debates, where his mouth frequently hung open and his responses were incoherent.
CNN: Biden just told donors that he nearly fell asleep during the debate because of all his international travel — despite having a week of rest at Camp David, including a daily naptime. Does that concern you at all?
Junior Rep. Max Frost: No pic.twitter.com/HSYVK32AHn
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 2, 2024
Yet astonishingly, Biden’s top advisers exited those sessions with what the book calls a “feeling good” mindset, hoping the president would simply “turn it on” during the debate. Biden campaign co-chair Jeffrey Katzenberg even remarked, “Our guy is a game-day performer.”
This was not confidence. It was desperation.
The public narrative—crafted both before and after the debate—suggests that Biden’s mental deterioration reached a new low on that June night. In reality, the signs had long been present and carefully managed. Reports of fatigue, confusion, and disengagement were not isolated. They were frequent. As Ron Klain later admitted in another account, Biden was “fatigued, befuddled, and disengaged” during debate prep—just as he appeared on the debate stage itself.
The notion that the debate revealed a decline is a political fiction. The debate merely removed the scaffolding.
President Biden froze and then had a verbal blunder, saying he “beat Medicare,” minutes after he kicked off his debate with former President Donald Trump on Thursday pic.twitter.com/enAH0xG13a
— New York Post (@nypost) June 28, 2024
For years, handlers shielded Biden from press interactions, minimized his unscripted appearances, and—quite literally—used costumed mascots like the Easter Bunny to guide him away from reporters. Every public event was meticulously choreographed to avoid exposure. The mainstream press played along, dismissing concerns as right-wing smears and brushing off red flags as quirks of age.
But in those 90 uninterrupted minutes, there was nowhere to hide.
As CNN contributor Scott Jennings rightly said this week, “We’ve lived through the greatest scandal in modern American political history.” It was not Biden’s decline that constituted the scandal—it was the deliberate cover-up of that decline by the Democratic Party, White House staff, and media figures who knew the truth but buried it.
Scott Jennings points out that the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline is the “greatest scandal in modern American political history.”
“If he had somehow won and were in office, you‘d have the same people on TV today saying, ‘He‘s fine. Behind closed doors, he‘s fine.’” pic.twitter.com/zPXo6JNGZQ
— Rusty (@Rusty_Weiss) May 14, 2025
Had Biden somehow managed to skip that debate, there is every reason to believe the narrative of competence would have persisted. He might have stumbled his way into a second term with the full weight of political and media institutions behind him, insisting—against all visible evidence—that everything was fine.
This was not a case of a president slipping in real-time. It was the reckoning of an illusion carefully maintained for years. The public saw it because—for the first time—they were allowed to.
