LEILA FADEL, HOST:
A new book details an alleged cover-up within the White House surrounding the declining health of former President Biden in recent years. It's called "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, And His Disastrous Choice To Run Again." Our All Things Considered colleague, Scott Detrow, spoke with the authors, CNN's Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios.
ALEX THOMPSON: There were two Bidens. There was a functioning Biden and a non-functioning Biden, and that goes back to, you know, 2019. But it was almost always functioning Biden.
JAKE TAPPER: Yeah.
THOMPSON: But beginning in 2023, the ratio of that functioning and non-functioning starts to change dramatically. And also, non-functioning Biden is getting worse.
FADEL: For Tapper and the rest of America, really, this decline became most apparent during the live broadcasts of the 2024 presidential debate.
TAPPER: Dana Bash, my co-moderator and I had these iPads so that we could write to the people in the control room, because obviously we can't talk to them, and there was only one or two commercial breaks. And I wrote, holy smokes, like, during that first rambling, awful non-answer where he said we finally beat Medicare.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOE BIDEN: Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID - excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with - look, if - we finally beat Medicare.
TAPPER: We had all seen evidence of decline, but the Biden team, family and senior advisers, were telling everybody, not just media and not just the public, but also Democratic donors and members of Congress, their own cabinet, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine, he's fine.
FADEL: Tapper and Thompson interviewed around 200 people for the book. And Thompson says that's not how other top aides and Democratic Congress members were feeling about Biden.
THOMPSON: The one top aide who left the White House said that they intentionally shielded him from other members of the administration, other members of the cabinet, other, you know, senior White House officials. The inner circle became smaller and smaller, and this White House official said that was intentional, so that they did not realize the extent of the decline. You also saw the schedule become much tighter and more restricted. We have, you know, months of internal schedules that show that, you know, he would go up to the residence and have dinner at 4, 4:30, 5. Other members of the administration also said that, you know, he just would go up to the residence very, very early, and they just wouldn't see him, you know, after a certain point of the day. And the schedule just became much more oriented about making sure that the public did not and other aides did not see non-functioning Biden.
FADEL: Now, with this cancer diagnosis, there are a lot of questions. Among them are this one asked by All Things Considered host Scott Detrow.
SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: Did anybody regret not speaking out? Or was it, this is the reality I saw, but it was career suicide to say that he couldn't run for another term, so in retrospect, I wouldn't say anything?
THOMPSON: If not regret, a lot of soul-searching about, what could I have done differently? You know, one person sort of put it to me this way. It was like, like, how many options were there? Like, they could've gone public, but would that have changed Joe Biden's mind? Probably not. And then it would've just helped Donald Trump.
TAPPER: Yeah.
THOMPSON: Now, the one thing that I think people are mad about that the inner circle especially didn't do, the ones that knew better, is you don't necessarily have to go public, but why not confront him? I haven't heard someone give a good answer. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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