A Stark Diagnosis

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, has received extraordinary attention in recent weeks, and for good reason. It is meticulously researched, tells an important story, and contains vignettes that will shock even the most cynical readers. It is also adroitly written. Although all readers know how the story ends, the authors created a genuine page turner. 

The book has a narrow focus, providing details about Joe Biden’s inner circle, as well as information about other top Democratic politicians and donors. It rarely expands outward to provide greater political or historical context. It nonetheless raises important questions that I hope all Americans with an interest in well-ordered politics and policymaking will ponder in the years ahead. Our increasingly dysfunctional Executive Branch suggests something has gone wrong with our constitutional order, requiring prudent reforms.

Original Sin is a rare work of political non-fiction that people across the partisan divide can enjoy, though for different reasons. Despondent progressives, looking for someone to blame for President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, can now point to some key figures who ensured that the Democratic Party would be in disarray in the months leading up to Election Day. Republican readers can relive the Schadenfreude of watching their opponents flame out. Even Biden loyalists should appreciate the sympathy the authors show the president, both for his sad decline and the heartbreaking personal losses he suffered over the previous decade, especially the death of one son and the legal and personal troubles of another. President Biden is presented as a tragic figure, not a villain.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, the Biden Administration’s “original sin” was the choice to run for a second term, despite clear signs of the president’s decline. Conservative pundits had been noting this for years, yet the president’s allies and, less forgivably, much of the mainstream media, denied that there was a problem. In a different era, other Democrats might have been more persistent in their efforts to determine whether Biden remained fit for the job, but because of their concern that another Trump presidency would end democracy in America, any criticism of the president was considered unseemly or even dangerous. Biden, after all, had defeated Trump once before. Could they be sure that another Democrat would have similar success?

Biden had previously declared that he intended to be a bridge to the Democratic Party’s future. When running in 2020, he telegraphed that he intended to defeat Trump, serve one term, and turn over the party’s reins to a younger standard-bearer. However, there was no mechanism in place to make him keep his word. His performance during his first years in office was, to most Democratic voters, acceptable. The Democratic Party’s presidential primary elections were perfunctory, at best. Insiders who witnessed Biden’s decline firsthand had few incentives to go public with their concerns. They feared being labelled as traitors, giving aid to Trump. Thus, most remained silent until Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump in June 2024 made his growing challenges undeniable.

Biden’s eventual withdrawal from the race scarcely improved the Democrats’ chances. There was no time at that point to hold a competitive primary election. Furthermore, failing to nominate Vice President Kamala Harris risked alienating key demographic groups in the party, even if she was an uninspiring candidate. Despite being nominated without much of a fight, she was in a difficult situation. She had spent months insisting the president was in perfect health. In accepting his departure and taking his place at the top of the ticket, was she acknowledging her own dishonesty about Biden’s cognitive decline? She wanted to present herself as an agent of change, but she had difficulty articulating how, if at all, her priorities would differ from Biden’s. She had little choice but to run as a quasi-incumbent, stuck with the baggage of her predecessor, with an unclear vision.

The book drives home that the problems of the modern presidency cannot be entirely blamed on Trump and his allies. Depending on one’s political allegiances, it is either vindicating or alarming that we saw many of the same pathologies during both administrations. To support their president, but perhaps more importantly to defeat his opponent, Democrats were willing to lie, to bite their tongues, to abandon principles, and ultimately act in ways that proved counterproductive to their own cause. Biden himself engaged in some of the same practices for which he and other Democrats had justifiably criticized Trump, most notably a penchant for nepotism and the baffling decision to keep classified documents unsecured in his personal residence.

The authors make a strong case that, at least when it came to foreign policy, Biden proved up to the task. Whatever one thinks about his approach to NATO and Ukraine, he was intensely focused and pursued his agenda with skill—at least for the first few years of his presidency, before his decline became more noticeable. With a limited amount of energy to spend, however, he gave less attention to many domestic affairs. The authors suggest, for instance, that Biden was largely asleep at the wheel when it came to immigration policy, letting more progressive young staffers make unpopular policy decisions that Biden himself would have likely opposed if he were paying more attention. His perceived weakness on the border proved to be a political gift to his Republican opponents.

I have previously warned conservatives that the right’s declining human capital, as measured by voting patterns among the highly educated, will create inevitable problems. It was thus interesting to learn that the Biden White House, despite having a large talent pool to draw from, was not exactly brimming with great minds. For instance, we learn that certain Biden aides did not know the difference between astronomy and astrology. The Biden Administration was also circled by its share of grifting consultants, demanding extraordinary sums far outweighing any value they might provide.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency.

As a conservative critic of the Republican Party’s populist turn, convinced it has resulted in great mischief and damage to our political institutions, it was a strange relief to see that many of the problems I see in the contemporary GOP are also found among their opponents. This is not based on a desire to engage in “whataboutism”—the effort to deflect criticism by pointing out the other side’s failings. Rather, seeing similar issues emerge across the partisan divide indicates we suffer from systematic problems, and this knowledge will assist us as we seek to diagnose their causes and consider potential solutions.

The authors offer few suggestions about how we can avoid similar issues in the future. They suggest that presidents need to be more forthcoming about the state of their health, including their mental capacity. It would be straightforward to legally require presidents to take regular physical and mental exams, with the results provided to the public. This strikes me as reasonable, though I doubt we will see such a development during the current administration. 

I am insufficiently naïve to believe that as a nation we can reach a bipartisan consensus on many major issues at the present time. I nonetheless hope that more people across the political spectrum will conclude that the role of the presidency in American politics has changed for the worse, becoming a hindrance to functional politics. All of politics now revolves around presidential elections. Members of the president’s party in Congress now fall in line behind the president’s agenda, becoming mere auxiliaries of the White House. Members of the opposing party seek to block that agenda, and they look for any reason (justified or not) to hinder presidents with a deluge of investigations and impeachment threats. Those members who would follow their own judgment and principles, rather than toe the party line, determined by the president, are viewed as turncoats. Members no longer seem interested in safeguarding their own institution’s prerogatives, unless it is to score ephemeral partisan points.

The presidency will always remain the ultimate prize in American politics. This was the case even when the office was considerably less powerful. It should not be the only office that interests us, however. Not so long ago, conservatives argued that Congress, not the presidency, should be the most powerful and important branch of the federal government. It may be time to revisit their arguments. The late conservative scholars James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall, reasonably considered two of the conservative movement’s sharpest minds, argued persuasively that Congress was intended to be the most important branch of the federal government, and its diminishing influence represented a major problem.

Burnham argued in his 1959 book, Congress and the American Tradition, that maintaining freedom requires strong checks and balances, but also a strong legislative branch. This would keep power sufficiently diffuse and keep tyrannical impulses at bay. However, as the ideology he called “democratism” has increased in strength, it has resulted in the nation’s greater insistence that policy reflect a mythical general will. This ideology loathes intermediary institutions that can block the people’s desires. A presidential election, according to this thinking, represents a national mandate for the winner, and pushback from other branches or levels of government is viewed as a betrayal of democracy. The result is popular support for an accumulation of presidential power. Perhaps ironically, in the name of perfecting democracy, the public is clamoring for a Caesar.

For Burnham, the transition toward executive supremacy was an existential danger to liberty. It is notable that, as an uncompromising Cold Warrior, Burnham understood the importance of a strong executive, but he also recognized its dangers. Unfortunately, much of the right today seems to wholeheartedly embrace executive power as the only solution to the problems they perceive with American governance. Burnham has received renewed attention from the intellectual right in recent years, largely because of his realistic approach to political power, both at home and abroad. I hope that more of his contemporary admirers will revisit his arguments on this question.

Kendall, for his part, also believed in the importance of a strong legislative branch, and warned against allowing other branches to usurp its powers. He argued that there are always two majorities in America: the presidential majority and the congressional majority. The presidential majority, being national in its scope, is perceived to represent the popular will of the nation. It prefers fast action, it is dismissive of deliberation, and it is inclined to demagoguery. The congressional majority, in contrast, better represents the nation’s diverse interests, makes decisions after lengthy debate, and ultimately provides a more accurate reflection of the people’s will. Kendall’s thought, I should note, has also received renewed interest from conservatives, in part because, of all the major post-war conservative intellectuals, Kendall is one of the very few who could be plausibly described as a populist. Unlike other conservatives of his day, he never exhibited anti-majoritarian views. He sincerely believed in majority rule, but he argued that the legislative branch was the best institution for discerning and implementing the majority’s will.

I am not suggesting that a rebalancing of power that weakens the executive branch will prove to be a panacea to the kinds of problems presented in Original Sin. Congress, of course, has its own gerontocracy problem, especially the Senate. However, Congress will never be so completely dominated by one person, and it would not long allow a senile member to maintain one of the more important positions of leadership. We could furthermore also start demanding that members of Congress also submit to annual health exams and publish the results. If this proves insufficient to drive out incompetent members, changes to the current seniority system that benefit long-term incumbents may be worth considering. In any case, it is time for members of Congress to claw back much of the authority they have given to the presidency, which alone would lower the stakes of presidential elections. A more independent legislative branch, less fixated on helping or hurting the president, would also be less apt to reward politicians according to their talents as sycophants or thoughtless obstructionists.

Although Original Sin is focused on the Biden White House, the scandal it documented reveals broader problems with our approach to the presidency. Partisan vitriol and polarization are not going away anytime soon, but I hope good-faith observers of American politics will recognize that neither side of the divide has a monopoly on shameful behavior, and the rot is deeper than a few vain political leaders. The cult of the presidency has become a hindrance to responsible government, regardless of which party occupies the Oval Office.