The sad defenders of Old Joe’s delusional hubris

I just finished reading Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s “Original Sin,” and at the risk of pissing off the multitude of knee-jerk Tapper-haters, their deep reporting laid out in excruciating detail what we’ve needed to hear:

That a seriously addled Joe Biden, fed by his own delusions and cocooned by his inner circle of wagon-circling sycophants, screwed us by refusing until it was far too late to hobble off stage and ultimately helped deliver us into the clutches of a convicted felon.

It pains me to write that because I long defended Joe – and his decision to run for re-election – even after smart people close to me insisted that he was ill fit for a second term. I ignored or dismissed so much of what should have been obvious and didn’t want to think of myself as “ageist.”

I remembered when Bob Dole ran for president in 1996 and was unfairly ridiculed for being 73. In 2008, when John McCain ran at age 71, David Letterman quipped: “McCain is the kind of guy who picks up the TV remote when the phone rings.”

So I just figured, hey, give Biden a break He’d returned decency to the Oval Office, he’d signed monumental legislation (the CHIPS Act, the Infrastructure law), he’d steered us out of the pandemic and reestablished respect for science – and therefore “he has earned the right” to run again. That’s what I told friends. And, it turns out, that’s precisely what members of “the Politburo” – Biden’s innermost insiders – told the outside world.

And to ensure that “right,” and to pummel any skeptics into submission, they hid his alarming true condition, playing us for saps.

This particular sap (yours truly) was therefore shocked out of his shoes when the real Biden was caught on camera during the June 2024 presidential debate, the man’s mouth agape the same way my late dad’s was during his waning days in assisted living. And the wayward words that came out of Joe’s mouth…good grief.

What we didn’t know then – and what we now know, thanks to this book – is that hiding the real Joe was a full-time job. The Politburo shaved his typical working day to six hours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., which was not ideal because various episodes in the wee hours required presidential attention (aides handled those overnight tasks).

They gave him note cards and teleprompters even for tiny events, and he often botched them anyway. They insisted, in advance of many meetings, that participants supply questions in advance so that they could script answers for Biden to recite. They limited his sitdowns with Cabinet members, who went months without seeing him. They surrounded him during his stiff walks to the presidential helicopter, shielding him from cameras. They tried to script him for two-minute videos, but he’d blow the lines and the footage was unusable.

One cynical Biden aide told Tapper and Thompson that the game plan was to win in 2024 and after that, “he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”

The plan went badly awry in February 2024 when special counsel Robert Hur weighed on whether Biden should be indicted for the classified papers he’d brought home after leaving the vice presidency. Hur concluded a jury would be reluctant to convict a “well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory.” Biden’s spinners condemned Hur for those purportedly “gratuitous” remarks, and I too was suckered by that spin. In a column I denounced Hur’s “character-smearing conclusion,” which “kicked Biden’s perceived Achilles heel with extreme prejudice.”

I now stand corrected, having read the Hur transcripts that appear in Tapper’s book.

I know there are still people who think Biden would’ve won in 2024 if he hadn’t been coaxed to exit (the internal Democratic polls the Poltiburo refused to show Biden said he would’ve been slaughtered), and I get that oftentimes it’s human nature to deny reality. George Orwell (of course) said it well: “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue…To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

So, naturally, the strugglers are furious about Tapper’s book. There’s the usual ” but what about” gripe, that all this coverage of Biden ignores Trump’s dangerous mental defects. I think that’s silly. Trump’s mental defects – his policy idiocy, his sociopathy, his textbook narcissism, his relentless lies – are being covered 24/7, in tandem with stories about the Tapper book. It’s possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. Indeed, piercing Bidenworld’s wall of bull is essential to understanding how we wound up with Trump the second time.

Another silly argument goes like this: Tapper held back all this info before the election so that he could cash in after the election! The reality is, White House insiders who covered for Biden before the election didn’t start talking til after the election. That’s typically how journalism works. As Tapper remarked in a podcast, “Very frustratingly, they (the insiders) got really honest after the election. And before that they were either not so honest or elusive or didn’t return calls and texts.”

The bottom line is Biden’s bitter-end defenders need to reckon for real with the truth. To deny the facts in Tapper’s book is to endorse this Orwellian delusion: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Except Orwell didn’t say that. Trump did. We all should be better than that.

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Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]