PD, May 15, 2025
Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign was built on a promise: to be a “bridge” to normalcy, implying a one-term president who would defeat Donald Trump, restore stability, and keep the “existential threat” of Trumpism at bay. Yet, by 2024, Biden’s refusal to step aside despite clear cognitive decline led to a catastrophic failure of that promise, handing Trump a second term. Now, Democratic insiders and media elites are admitting this failure—but they’re also rewriting history to absolve themselves, blaming Biden and a small circle of loyalists while ignoring their own complicity. This narrative doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, and its implications for how we understand the 2024 election—and the future of the Democratic Party—are profound.
The Establishment’s Admission: Biden’s Run Cost Democrats the Election
Democratic insiders, including David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign, and media figures like CNN’s Jake Tapper, have acknowledged that Biden’s decision to run for reelection doomed the Democrats. In Tapper’s new book Original Sin, co-authored with Alex Thompson, insiders lament that Biden’s decline—supposedly evident since 2015, according to the authors, following the death of his son Beau—was hidden by a small group of family and aides, leading to a disastrous 2024 campaign.[^1] Plouffe, quoted in a May 13, 2025, New Yorker article, is blunt: “And it’s all Biden. By deciding to run for reëlection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added, ‘He totally fucked us.’ As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people.”[^2]
Tapper’s own words in the New Yorker drive the point home: “Biden had framed his entire Presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and refusing to be honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.”[^3] This admission is stark: Biden’s number one promise—to be a bridge away from Trump and MAGA—was a spectacular failure. But the establishment’s narrative pins the blame on Biden’s “narcissistic and egotistical” personality and a tight-knit circle of loyalists, including his family and aides like Anita Dunn and Ron Klain.
A Narrative That Doesn’t Withstand Scrutiny
This thesis—that Biden and a small insular group single-handedly orchestrated a cover-up of his decline—cannot withstand empirical scrutiny. The record shows a systemic failure involving the Democratic Party, Congress, and major media outlets, all of whom either ignored or actively downplayed Biden’s struggles during his presidency, when he was widely embraced as fit to lead.
As early as late 2022, Biden’s cognitive decline was glaring. He held fewer press conferences than any modern president—only 11 solo ones by the end of 2023, compared to Trump’s 22 in a similar period.[^4] By 2023, Biden had largely stopped speaking impromptu, relying on teleprompters or softball interviews with allies like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, which were often cringeworthy. A June 2024 Time Magazine interview revealed Biden arriving with a dozen aides, who frequently interjected to “guide” the conversation, with Biden struggling to complete sentences and mixing up basic details like the timeline of his vice presidency.[^5] Livestream footage—such as Biden freezing for nearly a minute at a Juneteenth event on June 10, 2024—showed him lost on stages or motionless while others danced around him.[^6] These clips, often circulated by right-wing sources, were dismissed by outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post as “cheap fakes,” a term used to discredit unedited footage.[^7]
Media outlets with access to insider accounts, like The Wall Street Journal’s June 2024 exposé on Biden’s cognitive lapses, were attacked for their reporting. The Journal detailed Biden’s confusion in meetings—forgetting names, needing aides to finish his thoughts, and freezing mid-sentence—based on interviews with over 45 sources across party lines.[^8] Yet, Poynter labeled the piece “foul,” citing reliance on anonymous and partisan sources like Kevin McCarthy, while ignoring its substance.[^9] CNN’s Jake Tapper, now a critic of Biden in Original Sin, was among the loudest defenders at the time, dismissing the Journal’s report as a “hit piece” in June 2024 and attacking Rep. Dean Phillips for raising Biden’s age during a February 2024 interview.[^10] Tapper’s on-air defense of Biden continued into Spring 2024, with clips compiled by Glenn Greenwald showing him calling concerns about Biden’s health “misinformation.”[^11]
The Democratic Party itself was complicit, and party leaders outside Biden’s inner circle continue to stonewall on their role, directly contradicting the book’s narrative of a small-scale cover-up. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, when pressed by CNN’s Kasie Hunt on May 14, 2025, about whether he knew Biden was unfit for a second term, repeatedly said, “We’re looking forward,” refusing to engage.[^12] MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked Schumer about a specific anecdote in Original Sin—a June 2024 fundraiser where Biden failed to recognize George Clooney, the same month Schumer claimed on X that Biden was “in command and impressive” in meetings—but he gave the same non-answer.[^13] House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Amy Klobuchar echoed this deflection, with Jeffries saying, “We’re not looking backward,” and Klobuchar telling NBC’s Kristen Welker, “We’re not on the History Channel right now.”[^14] These leaders are not part of Biden’s inner circle, yet their stonewalling suggests they were complicit in the cover-up, not deceived by a White House operation as the book claims. If the deception was truly “all Biden” and limited to a small group gaslighting the public, why are senior Democrats outside that circle still refusing to admit what they knew, even after the election? This contradiction, highlighted by Tapper’s own reporting, undermines the book’s attempt to isolate blame to Biden and his loyalists, pointing instead to a broader systemic failure within the party leadership.
Media figures who enabled this narrative are now playing “gotcha” with these insiders. Kasie Hunt, who covered Congress for MSNBC during Biden’s presidency and rarely challenged his fitness, pressed Schumer hard in her CNN interview. MSNBC’s Katy Tur, who interviewed Biden sympathetically in 2023, now grills Democrats on their past defenses. This shift highlights their own complicity—they had the platform to raise concerns earlier but chose not to, likely to preserve access and avoid backlash.
Even influential allies like George Clooney failed to act on clear warning signs. At the June 2024 fundraiser, Biden’s failure to recognize Clooney was a “terrifying” moment, yet Clooney continued to lead the charge as part of Biden’s fundraiser elite, hosting events to bolster his campaign.[^15] It wasn’t until after Biden’s disastrous June 27, 2024, debate that Clooney spoke out, publishing a July 10, 2024, op-ed in The New York Times calling for Biden to step aside.[^16] Now hailed as a moral voice for helping push Biden out, Clooney’s earlier silence enabled the very outcome he later decried, undermining the narrative of his courage.
Rank-and-File Democrats: Avoiding a Reckoning
While the establishment admits Biden’s failure, many rank-and-file Democrats reject the need for a reckoning, framing critics like Tapper as the real betrayers who handed Trump the election. A search for “Jake Tapper” on X reveals pages of comments under his May 14, 2025, post, expressing animosity—not for his hypocrisy in defending Biden on air until 2024, which would be warranted, but for daring to question Biden’s fitness at all. These Democrats argue that Biden was capable of serving another term and that, had he won, he would now be a functioning president in good shape, keeping Trump out of office. This mindset is epitomized by accounts like @What46HasDone
, whose handle—“You Should’ve Said Nicer Things About Joe Biden”—and 60,000 followers reflect the belief that more positive coverage could have sustained Biden’s campaign, a view echoed by prominent voices like influential X user, Brooklyn Dad Defiant, with his million-strong following. This fantasy—that Biden was fit for the job and could have continued fooling the public with the party and media’s support—ignores the reality of his public struggles, from his limited press conferences to his visible freezes in livestream footage. By clinging to this denial, these Democrats avoid accountability for the party’s broader failures, perpetuating the same mindset that enabled Biden’s run and led to the Democratic collapse in 2024
Why This Matters: The Danger of a Sanitized History
This scapegoating of Biden and his inner circle matters because it erases the broader accountability of the Democratic establishment and media elites. If this narrative becomes the orthodox history in left-of-center scholarship and journalism, the lessons of this hubris and top-down cover-up will be lost. The cowardice of those who knew but stayed silent—except in rare, on-background whispers—will be forgotten. The attack-dog behavior of figures like Tapper, who dismissed legitimate concerns while defending Biden on air, will be buried. The complicity of allies like Clooney, who saw Biden’s decline firsthand but continued to fundraise until it was politically safe to speak out, will be whitewashed. The constant party and media denials of livestream footage—evidence that citizens could see with their own eyes—will be swallowed by an implausible conspiracy story about one man and his entourage. Biden and his insiders played a significant role, no doubt, but the idea that this cover-up could have been carried out without widespread buy-in from the party, Congress, and media is an insult to citizens who deserve to know how we got here.
The 2024 election wasn’t just a failure of Biden—it was a failure of the Democratic ecosystem that propped him up. Insiders like Plouffe, Schumer, and media figures like Tapper, who now profit from books like Original Sin while evading their own roles, must be held accountable. The New Yorker article captures their self-victimization, but it ignores the systemic denial that enabled Biden’s run. The contradiction between the book’s claim of a small-scale cover-up and the stonewalling of party leaders like Schumer—who were not part of Biden’s inner circle but still refuse to admit what they knew—reveals the depth of this systemic failure. We must reject this sanitized history and demand a full reckoning—from the party leaders who stonewalled, the media who dismissed the truth, and the grassroots who refused to see the warning signs. Only then can the Democratic Party learn from its mistakes and rebuild trust with the American people.
Endnotes
[^1]: Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, Penguin Press, May 20, 2025.
[^2]: The New Yorker, “The Democrats’ Reckoning,” May 13, 2025.
[^4]: American Presidency Project, “Presidential News Conferences,” accessed May 15, 2025.
[^5]: Time Magazine, “Biden’s Final Test,” June 2024.
[^6]: Newsweek, “Biden’s Awkward Moment at Juneteenth Event Sparks Debate,” June 12, 2024.
[^7]: The New York Times, “The ‘Cheap Fake’ Campaign Against Biden,” June 2024.
[^8]: The Wall Street Journal, “Behind Closed Doors: Biden’s Struggles with Clarity,” June 4, 2024.
[^9]: Poynter, “The Wall Street Journal’s Story on Biden’s Mental Fitness: Fair or Foul?,” June 7, 2024.
[^10]: CNN, The Lead with Jake Tapper, June 2024; CNN, Interview with Dean Phillips, February 2024.
[^11]: Glenn Greenwald, System Update, May 2025.
[^12]: Fox News, “Schumer, Democrats Dodge Questions About Brutal Biden Revelations with ‘Looking Forward’ Talking Point,” May 14, 2025.
[^15]: Axios, “Biden Didn't Recognize George Clooney at Fundraiser: New Book,” May 13, 2025.
[^16]: George Clooney, “I Love Joe Biden, But We Need a New Nominee,” The New York Times, July 10, 2024.
