Who was to blame for Joe Biden?

THE WORST THING WE READ™

And How Did We Get Donald Trump?

IT'S TIME ONCE again—as Donald Trump takes his tour of the Middle East to try to collect investment money and a free luxury jumbo jet for himself as unconstitutional emoluments from various despots, and as Trump's Justice Department manufactures criminal charges against a medical researcher to try to retroactively justify Trump's Department of Homeland Security sweeping her up in its campaign of abuse against immigrants—for Democratic Party insiders and the political press to focus their attention on the problems of the Democratic Party, in the person of Joe Biden. The CNN anchor Jake Tapper and the Axios political reporter and CNN contributor Alex Thompson have written a book about the end of the Biden presidency and last year's abortive reelection bid. The book is called Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, and the New Yorker published an excerpt from it. 

Trump's victory in the 2024 election was, unquestionably, a disaster; it could end up being the most catastrophic thing to happen to the United States since Secession, or more destructive than that, even. It effectively delivered the government into the hands of the same people who tried to overthrow it in 2021, and they are running the country with the malice and destructive frenzy of conquerors. 

"He stole an election from the Democratic Party," said "one prominent Democratic strategist—who publicly defended Biden," according to Tapper and Thompson. "He stole it from the American people." 

"He," here, referred to Joe Biden. But there was a deep illogic in the story Tapper and Thompson were telling, an illogic of which the hypocrisy of their anonymous source—lashing out at Biden anonymously in a postmortem after having promoted him in public—was only a symptom. The trouble was built right into the book's subtitle, in which Biden was in "decline," yet was also still the person responsible for his own "choice."