CNN's Jake Tapper calls his new book a tragedy. Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which Tapper co-authored with Axios' Alex Thompson, describes two Joe Bidens.
"The first one is the one that everybody got to know during his vice presidency," Tapper says. "And the second one was kind of a non-functioning Joe Biden. ... And that non-functioning Biden would rear his head increasingly starting in, like, 2019, 2020. And then, as his term went on, more and more behind the scenes."
The book describes a president who failed to recognize longtime political allies, lost his train of thought in important conversations and forgot important dates, including the death of his son, Beau: "We in the public would see some of it in front of the cameras ... but we had no idea how bad it was," Tapper says.