The Fall of Biden

On 'Original Sin' and 'Uncharted'

Glass Century continues to, as a great rock band once sang, get around. UnHerd deemed my new novel, in a fantastic essay, “a moving, multigenerational social novel” and “a corrective lens for the eye that can only see the present.” I had a wonderful conversation with Stephen Adubato about Glass Century while sitting outside a Bay Ridge café. Afterwards, I appeared on Vox’s “Today, Explained” to talk about the vanishing young male novelist, a topic of hot discourse right now. If you haven’t bought and read Glass Century yet, RealClear Books has an excerpt for you; this section is about 9/11.

As a reminder, Glass Century is available in all formats (print, e-book, audio) and you should buy it now. Hard copies are for sale, once again, at P&T Knitwear on 180 Orchard Street in Manhattan. I’ve signed them all. The first run sold out and they’re back due to popular demand. Get them before they’re gone.

Please, once you’ve read my novel, rate and review it on Goodreads. Thank you!

If you’re in New York City tomorrow, I am told there are a few tickets left to see me in conversation with the great critic Megan Gafford in Tribeca. We kick off at 6:30. Don’t miss it.

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I don’t know if I’m the most or least ideal person to write a review of two new books about Joe Biden and the 2024 campaign. I have covered American politics for more than a decade and have many thoughts about Biden, the Democrats, and the long con perpetrated over the ex-president’s obvious deterioration. In September 2022, for New York Magazine, I wrote a column arguing that Biden, then seventy-nine, should announce he is not seeking re-election and permit the Democrats to wage an open primary to replace him. My argument was straightforward: Biden was plainly too old, and mentally slipping. Anyone who paid even a marginal amount of attention to politics would know this.

For that column, I was sent many nasty emails, tweets, and whatnot. How dare I question Biden. How dare I indulge in conspiracy theories. I was another devious MAGA pawn, doing the bidding of the once and future president. Biden was still whip-smart, they insisted, and Trump was a frothing lunatic. What a fool I was for implying Biden might be in trouble.

We know now how it all turned out. Alex Thompson, a dogged Biden chronicler for Axios, and Jake Tapper, the prominent CNN host, have the goods: their new Biden book, Original Sin, is shooting to the tops of various best-seller lists and setting Washington D.C. aflame. The revelations are all very public now, so I won’t spend an enormous amount of time detailing them all. Biden couldn’t recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser; Biden couldn’t remember the names of his top aides; Biden could only work in the middle part of the day; Biden might have needed a wheelchair; Biden definitely needed a teleprompter for everything short of whispering “hello” and “goodbye.”

Biden’s inner circle—dubbed, in Original Sin, the “Politburo”—shielded him from interactions with the public as much as possible and even kept him away from other cabinet secretaries and top Democrats. They erected a sort of fantasyland or small-scale cult around Biden, believing even after his disastrous 2024 debate performance that all was fine for their boss and he’d recover soon enough. They believed in their bullish private polling which, in retrospect, seemed to be little more than fan fiction. The whole lot of them (Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed) should be metaphorically shot into the sun, or at least literally tarred and feathered on a sunny D.C. weekend. The fourth, Ron Klain, was delusional too, but he was at least the de facto president during Biden’s first two years and can be credited with shepherding through far-reaching legislation on green energy, domestic manufacturing, and infrastructure investment.

I can’t quite sing hosannahs for Thompson and Tapper. I am glad they’re getting paid handsomely and wish them all the best. I will always have a higher regard for Tapper than his CNN colleagues because he was one of the only anchors to stand up to Andrew Cuomo in 2020 and 2021 when a dangerous amount of mythologizing was taking place over the New York governor’s pandemic response. Thompson is a strong reporter, and he’s being rewarded for his years on the Biden beat, one that was devoid of glamour when compared to the 2010s Trump run which minted a shocking number of media stars. Reading the actual book, though, was a reminder of how stylistically slack contemporary political tomes usually are, and why close to one hundred percent of them have no staying power. Beyond, perhaps, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, almost all the Trump 1.0 books are forgotten; if this is the fate of most books, the Trump chronicles, absurdly hyped, suffered from a striking inability to graduate beyond daily gossip to reveal some fundamental truth about the country. They were, on the whole, insubstantial efforts.

Original Sin may, like Fire and Fury, endure in some hazy manner, a totem of a particular era. It reads at times like a glorified PowerPoint, broken up into numerous short sections with inventive titles like “Bill Daley, Part Two” and “A Weird Period.” Cliches abound, as do vagaries. We are told Robert Hur, the longtime federal prosecutor who oversaw Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and infamously found the president to be “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” had previously spent a spell in the private sector “finally making some money to support his wife and three kids.” How much is “some” money? Thompson and Tapper can’t tell us. It’s a curious detail, and speaks to the dullness of the prose and the lax editing that can go into these kinds of works.

Naturally, Original Sin is stuffed with blind quotes. Democrats, unnamed, fume about Biden, fume about each other, and cast retrospective aspersions. It’s the nature of political reporting to indulge in anonymous sourcing, but it’s a trend that kills trust and opens the door to many more uncomfortable questions. Why did either author have so much trouble producing a report like this in 2022, 2023, or in the months of 2024 leading into the catastrophic June debate with Trump? Where was the media? As early as 2022, Biden was mangling basic facts in public, claiming his son died in Iraq and not of brain cancer, and calling out to an already dead congresswoman at a White House event. Sure, the Democratic establishment is thick with cowards and liars, but why couldn’t journalists see through it all? Why allow yourself to get browbeaten by such insipid people? Original Sin won’t tell us.

Arriving at the same time is Chris Whipple’s Uncharted, a less buzzy account of the 2024 campaign. Whipple, a writer and documentary filmmaker who is sympathetic to the Democrats, offers a crisp, chatty overview of all that went wrong for Biden and Kamala Harris. Like Original Sin, Whipple delves into Biden’s infirmities and his team’s manic efforts to shield him from scrutiny. Like Original Sin, Whipple does not, in any meaningful way, reckon with the media’s greater failures. What does help Uncharted is its relative even-handedness: Whipple has been able to earn the trust of Republicans and converses with many of them. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have him over to their D.C. mansion. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff and 2024 campaign manager, returns his phone calls.

Most entertainingly, perhaps, Paul Manafort is a constant text and Zoom companion, offering his thoughts on the 2024 campaign in something close to real-time. Manafort is worth the price of admission, a kingpin of sleaze who is remarkably unethical even by Trumpworld standards. Reaping millions as a lobbyist for foreign dictators, he’s best remembered for co-chairing Trump’s 2016 campaign and later heading to prison on a range of charges related to his consulting work. Pardoned by Trump in 2020, he remained in his former boss’ orbit, and constantly asserts to Whipple, throughout last year, that Trump is going to win again. He is unmoved by the hype around Harris. “We’re winning and her vote is underperforming in early voting,” he tells Whipple. “And it’s where you would think—in the urban areas, the Black community, the Hispanic community. The fact that they haven’t been able to get out the urban area vote is a bad sign for them.” Manafort wasn’t wrong.

Whipple is far too high on Harris, who was a genuinely dismal general election candidate, but he helpfully documents the foibles and delusions of her campaign team, which was mostly composed of Biden and Obama operatives. They fail, along with the principal, to articulate a compelling rationale for running and spend large stretches of the campaign shielding Harris from conventional and alternative media alike. They fail miserably, along with Harris herself, to separate the campaign from Biden’s unpopular presidency. In the end, Democrats lost 2024 as much as Trump won it. Wiles, speaking to Whipple about Harris at the close of Uncharted, admits as much. “It didn’t seem like she even tried,” the next White House chief of staff says. That about sums it up.