Let me cut to the chase. Even if there were a “cover up” of the previous president’s age and infirmity, that’s not why Donald Trump won. 

Yet that is the allegation hiding in the subtext of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book. The sin in Original Sin is evidently the sin of pride, as in: Joe Biden was just too damn proud to let go of power. And due to his sinfulness, our democracy is now on the brink of collapse.

Most of the attention seems to be on the question of Biden’s cognitive decline. Virtually none is on the question itself and the reasons behind it. That’s because, according to the logic of the Washington press corps, it’s normal to blame Democrats for the choices of Republicans. The thinking goes that Trump didn’t win. Biden handed him victory.

Because Democrats are the only ones with agency, they are the only ones held accountable. Donald Trump and the Republicans are therefore free to say whatever they want with an understanding among reporters who provide coverage that there’s no stopping them.

This is why there was so much reporting on Biden’s age, before the election and now afterward, but nothing close to equivalent coverage of the current president’s blindingly obvious mental deterioration. If there was a cover-up for Biden, there is surely a cover-up for Trump. But given the state of today’s news, we may never know about it. 

The impact of this double standard goes beyond media framing. It can warp public understanding of politics, according to Scott Lemieux. Scott teaches constitutional law at the University of Washington. He’s probably best known as co-founder of Lawyers, Guns and Money. 

In this interview with me, Scott explains why he believes that even if Biden had dropped out after the 2022 midterms, Vice President Kamala Harris would still have been the Democratic Party’s nominee. 

Scott said that to say Trump won because Biden didn’t step down “is at best a vast oversimplification driven by a political vision in which Democrats are the only actors (and letting the press entirely off the hook for the normalization of Trump, even in the wake of January 6.)”

Let’s establish some facts. Was there a cover-up? Or are Tapper and Thompson pandering to the Republicans by piling on Biden?

This may not be a fully satisfying answer, but I think there’s some of both. Clearly, Tapper and Thompson are playing on Biden’s unpopularity and Republican desires to distract from Trump’s countless problems to sell books. But Biden does seem to have declined pretty substantially in his last 12 to 18 months in office. I think it’s clear he should not have run again, and Biden’s inner circle were not sufficiently candid with the public, or in advising the president.

How do this play into your view of Tapper and Thompson’s book? Trump isn’t a spring chicken either. He’s corrupt to the core. Yet Tapper said recently that this “cover up” was worse than Watergate.

Unlike EMAILS, or most of the Hunter Biden stuff, Biden’s age and ability to run again, and the conduct of his closest advisors, were real issues worthy of coverage. But there remain real questions of proportionality. The risks of an aging president “mysteriously” became much less central to press coverage when Harris became the Democratic nominee, and the full-court press on this book is detracting from Trump’s increasing incoherence and apparent lack of command of the policies being issued by his own administration.

Obviously, Tapper and Thompson have a book to sell, and it is what it is, but people will have a legitimate beef against the press if Trump’s age and decline don’t get a proportionate amount of coverage.

We’re talking about more than proportionality. We’re talking about a press corps that tends to hold the Democrats accountable for the Republicans’ choices. The New Yorker excerpt of Original Sin was titled “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump.”

I would also take issue with the empirical assumption being made. 

While I agree that Biden should not have run again, had he stepped down after the midterms, the result probably would have been Vice President Kamala Harris still being the nominee after an extremely divisive primary in which Gaza would have played a major role.

Any serious analysis of the 2024 elections needs to start with the fact that Harris did better than any other peer incumbent since 2021. That’s not to say that she was a perfect candidate or ran a flawless campaign, but “Trump only won because Biden didn’t step down in 2022” is at best a vast oversimplification driven by a political vision in which Democrats are the only actors (and letting the press entirely off the hook for the normalization of Trump, even in the wake of January 6.)

Related to the “cover up” of Biden’s age are the allegations that elite Democrats covered up the truth about Biden’s primary victory in 2020. You wrote recently about how this book invites rewriting that history, and rewriting it badly. Can you explain?

Tapper recently asserted that the 2020 primary was the result of a metaphorical “smoke filled room” in which “Barack Obama and others called Buttigieg and Klobuchar and Booker and Warren and all the others, and encouraged them to drop out and get behind Biden.” 

First, there’s the factual sloppiness. Booker dropped out in January, Warren (and Bloomberg) didn’t drop out before Super Tuesday. That sloppiness isn’t just incidental. When you look at what really happened — two minor candidates with little money and who had no appeal outside of the small white rural states frontloaded in the process dropped out, as happens in every competitive primary — it’s very, very obvious that it was immaterial to the outcome of the race.

What actually happened is that Democratic elites were at best mostly lukewarm about Biden, and were hoping that a younger candidate would emerge. I’m sure there was some coordination between Obama and Klobuchar/Buttigeig after South Carolina and Alabama, but the conventional wisdom Tapper repeats gets cause and effect backwards. Party elites wanted to unite around Biden, because his win had become inevitable. It wasn’t the reason Biden’s win was inevitable. 

An honest account of the 2020 primary would start with the fact that Biden was (for better or worse) the clear choice of Democratic voters, not the result of some elite conspiracy. And going forward, the left of the party needs to recognize that the strategy pursued by Bernie Sanders in 2020 — run a factional campaign and hope to win as a minority candidate at a contested convention — was a dead end, tactically and democratically, that shouldn’t be tried again.

Last question. Swing for the fences. Why is political journalism so dumb? It could be really good, but it’s not. And it’s making us dumber. There seems to be no incentive in the other direction.

This is a complex question. I’m not sure I understand why. Obviously, there’s plenty of good work being done by individual reporters and outlets. The biggest problem is at the editorial level. As you said earlier, there’s a strong latent tendency to make Democrats the main characters of the political universe, and hold them to higher standards. This was particularly evident in 2016, when Trump was covered as a sideshow and Clinton was covered as if she was the president-elect.

One really glaring example was the refusal of any mainstream outlet to publish any of the hacked material about the Trump campaign provided by Iranian intelligence. In isolation, this is perfectly defensible. None of the material that surfaced was particularly interesting, and I think there should be a pretty tough standard for publishing hacked material, because of the bad incentives. 

But it’s impossible to square with the media’s conduct in 2016, in which hacked material spun on behalf of Trump received enormous amounts of coverage despite containing no serious news value. 

The press is not obliged to learn from its mistakes, but it owed the public an explanation, and the fact that editors generally didn’t feel that it was owed one is very telling. I don’t think there’s an easy solution, but we need to start by acknowledging there’s a real problem.

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