The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election, CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson decided to co-author a book about what had led the Democratic party to defeat, with a focus on former President Joe Biden.
The deeply sourced reporters found what they call a “cover-up” of the former president’s “serious decline.”
The resulting book, titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” is coming out on May 20.
The book’s publisher, Penguin Press, announced the project on Wednesday.
“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents,” Penguin said in a press release.
Biden, “his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations,” the press release stated.
“Toni Morrison once said ‘If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,’” Jake Tapper said in a statement. “That’s what inspired this book: we wanted to know more about what we all just lived through. More than 200 interviews later, Alex and I have a much better idea. And soon you all will too.”
Tapper had a unique vantage point as the co-moderator of the June 2024 CNN debate that led Biden to drop out of the presidential race a few weeks later.
Tapper and Thompson write in the book that “what the world saw at Joe Biden’s one and only debate was not an anomaly — it was not a cold, it was not someone who was under or overprepared, it was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose faculties had been diminishing for years.”
“Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” the authors write. “What was the extent of it? Was it a cover-up? Was it a conspiracy? We will let the facts speak for themselves.”
A book on Biden by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson reports a ‘cover up’ about his decline – Penguin Random House
The rest of the book is subject to a strict embargo, as is often the case with forthcoming releases that contain big scoops.
“Original Sin” is one of several forthcoming books relating to the 2024 election. During Biden’s four years in office, there was a general impression among editors and publishers that the book-buying public had little appetite for books about Biden – in sharp contrast to the hunger for books about all things Trump.
Thompson, who is also a CNN contributor, actually had an earlier book deal to write about Biden’s presidency, and his original publisher, Simon & Schuster, withdrew the contract in 2023. Politico called it “a further reflection of the soft market for books” about Biden.
But book industry perceptions changed after Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed former Vice President Kamala Harris, and even more so after Harris lost to Trump.
Tapper and Thompson decided to zoom in on what they dub Biden’s “original sin” – his decision to run for a second term.
“The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat,” the publisher stated in the promotional material for the book. “The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence.”
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