Final Word on the Non-Scandal that Biden Was Too Old to Run Again (and Getting Older Every Day!)

A heavyweight Beltway journalist, one of many who wrote about the president's age years before the 2024 election, wonders how to engineeer a "cover up" of an undeniable fact that's in plain sight

By Mark Leibovich The Atlantic

Washington is abuzz these days, The Atlantic has learned. I love it when Washington is abuzz. Let’s jump right in. Why the buzzing?

Because apparently, Joe Biden is still really old. Older than he was last summer, when Washington was even more abuzz about the 46th president being really old—and about whether he was fit to lead the country, run for reelection, beat Donald Trump, thwart fascism, etc.

Or three years ago, when overwhelming majorities of Americans were already saying in polls that Biden should definitely not seek reelection. Or two years ago, when he declared that he would in fact seek reelection, while Democrats anguished (off the record; you did not hear this from me) that if Biden went ahead with a campaign, it would surely end in disaster. Or six months ago, when it did, in fact, end in disaster.

Or, for that matter, Sunday, when Biden announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer—an especially pronounced marker of his advanced age.

You know what else is old? The story about Biden being old.

For the latest chapter in this saga, we give thanks to a new book, out today, whose arrival has been as hotly anticipated around Washington as a sundae cart at the senior home. Biblically titled Original Sin, the book—by the CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson—offers the latest after-action report of the calamitous culmination of Biden’s career. The book depicts a kind of West Wing Weekend at Bernie’s, with Biden playing the frail, prideful, and self-deluded leader.

Original Sin includes the requisite shocking new details—many of which have already been pre-circulated and selectively leaked, probably by the publisher, in an effort to drum up more excitement for the book. (You think buzz gets generated on its own?) Oh, and you can read The Atlantic’s excerpt of the book here.

“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” David Plouffe, one of Kamala Harris’s top campaign aides, told the authors, referring to the president’s refusal to step aside until it was way too late.

Other revelations: Biden routinely forgot the names of his top aides. His personal doctor advocated for him to get more rest. There were “internal discussions” about putting him in a wheelchair. “It was incredible,” one Democrat told the authors, referring to Biden’s state in 2020. “This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn’t be driving.” Four years later, Biden seemed not to recognize George Clooney, despite having met the handsome actor on many occasions. “Clooney was shaken to his core,” Tapper and Thompson write.

Original Sin focuses heavily on how Biden, his family, his White House staff, and many top Democrats conspired to hide the extent of the president’s deterioration from the public. It describes how journalists who dared report on the matter were bullied, frozen out, and gaslighted by the White House.

The somewhat loaded and breathless term cover-up has gotten tossed around a lot in the promotion of Original Sin, including in the book’s subtitle (President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again).

Strategic umbrage-taking. The authors have engaged in some strategic umbrage-taking, including at last month’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

In remarks at the event, Thompson chided the previous administration for concealing the president’s full decrepitude but also finger-wagged his fellow journalists for not reporting more vigorously on Biden’s decline.

“We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows,” Thompson said while accepting the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, for his work on Biden.

This came a minute or so after Thompson mentioned that Original Sin was “available for preorder right now” (proving, as always, that if shamelessness is not the “original sin” of book promotion, it’s definitely in the top three.) He added that “being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves” and that “we should have done better.”

I should note that everything Thompson said was true, if somewhat obvious, and also that Biden and his aides and family members—the cover-uppers—deserve a history’s worth of blame for this episode. But here’s the deal, as the former president might say (presumably between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., his peak mental-acuity time): Politicians and their spinmeisters are not always on the level.

No one would be “shaken to their core” by this statement. Just as scores of Republicans in Washington have been privately horrified over the years by Trump’s conduct while they’ve smothered him in rhetorical smooches on the record, Democrats confidentially expressed near-unanimous awareness of Biden’s feeble state, but claimed the exact opposite in front of cameras and microphones.

Here’s the deal, part two: The overriding objective of any White House is to make the principal look as good as possible. This is done through basic flackery, gobbledygook, selective disclosure, and rampant omission. We should not expect aides or congressional allies to run out and announce to the nation that the president—any president—seemed really out to lunch at his economic briefing, or was hurling ketchup against the wall, or was messing around with an intern.

Hiding in plain sight. Yes, it’s a cynical business, politics, but here is why I think that the “cover-up” of Biden’s “true condition” is beside the point—and why I’m not really vibing with the umbrage-mongering: It’s pretty much impossible to “cover up” for something that is hiding in plain sight.

Democrats could trot out as many White House officials as they wanted to claim I was with the president just this morning, and he was sharp as a tack and running circles around staffers less than half his age. But whenever Biden was allowed to go out in public—a rarity, which itself was a red flag—the public’s preexisting consensus about his infirmity was only reinforced. Biden was in no position to keep doing his job given his condition, which had been evident for years to most people paying even casual attention.

Observable facts, people: They can be a real pain to cover up.

Getting older every day. In the spirit of full—and, yes, shameless—disclosure, I am obligated to inform readers that I have been observing these facts in my coverage for years. (Without me, the American public might never have caught on that Biden is old!): In June 2022, I wrote an article for The Atlantic headlined “Why Biden Shouldn’t Run in 2024.” It began, “Let me put this bluntly: Joe Biden should not run for reelection in 2024. He is too old.” You get the gist. I am a brave and courageous truth teller.

Although Tapper and Thompson interviewed approximately 200 people, I spoke with fewer than a dozen for that story, relying mostly on my own two eyes and a few obvious data points, such as the fact that Biden would be 82 on Inauguration Day 2025 and 86 at the end of his hypothetical second term. “He just seems old,” one senior administration official told me at the time.

Over the next two years, I contributed periodic entries to the “Biden is too old” canon. One story called for some Democrat, or several Democrats, to primary him; another was about how he seemed destined to become a presidential version—a far more calamitous version—of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I wrote a “Time to Go, Joe” article in the hours after Biden’s debate face-plant last June and another headlined “C’mon, Man” nearly two weeks later, when Joe had still not gone.

Yes, a lot of White House and Democratic operatives were upset with me at the time.

Early on, they insisted that I was wrong (I was with him just this morning), ageist, unfair, and uninformed. As time went on, several people in Biden world accused me of being obsessed with the president’s age and “beating a dead horse.” As it turned out, I had barely laid a hand on the horse, given the pulverizing in store for Biden after his debate debacle—which was when he effectively sent his own legacy to the glue factory.

The Biden age story will surely persist.

In a recent review of Original Sin, my colleague Tyler Austin Harper praised the authors, correctly, for “describing a gruesome political car crash in dispassionate, clinical detail.” He also called it “the latest and most significant book to date about Biden’s cognitive decline.” I found two of Harper’s words to be quite ominous: to date.

Mark Leibovich, staff writer for The Atlantic, is the author of the Beltway classics, “This Town” and “Thank You for Your Servitude.” Subscribe to the magazine here.

Image: President Joe Biden at the June 27, 2024 debate with Donald Trump.