THE DISMANTLING WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN COMING

Could Trump’s wrecking crew have been stopped?

Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought talks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House on May 22. / Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

It was in 2023 that I began hearing stories from sources in direct contact with Joe Biden about the president occasionally needing family members and close aides to finish his sentences and his problems walking down staircases. I learned that at pre-event briefings the Secret Service began requesting that no women should be sitting in the front row for any presidential speeches at any venues: the fear was that he might slip on being introduced and be rescued by a woman. The senior aides in the White House didn’t want that sort of photograph on front pages around the world.

Old friends from his days in the Senate soon realized that Biden was not always able, or permitted, to return cell phone calls. But it wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal published a major front-page expose on Biden’s serious condition on June 4, 2024, that I understood the extent to which I had censored myself.

One reason to dwell on the issue now is that Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, the authors of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, the new bestselling book on Biden’s failings as masked by his family and staff, had every reason to know something—if not more than what the Journal published—long before the election season. As a broadcaster with a national audience, Tapper did no reporting for the public on that issue when it mattered—when there was still time for the Democratic leadership to pressure Biden to withdraw and hold an open convention to pick a new candidate.