Original Sin, which came out on Tuesday, has captured the Zeitgeist in a way rare for political books not centered on Donald Trump. The best-selling, heavily reported exposé by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson paints a picture of President Joe Biden’s rapid physical and mental deterioration in office. Biden, they report, frequently failed to carry out the traditional duties of the presidency, alarming lawmakers, fundraisers, and anyone else who witnessed his decline up close. Biden’s inner circle, whom Tapper and Thompson dub the Politburo, guarded access to the president while insisting that he was the only candidate who could beat Trump, ignoring the voluminous evidence that voters considered him unfit for another term. They argue that the Democratic Party rationalized Biden’s candidacy, barreled through warning signs like the damning Hur Report, and generally failed to prevent disaster until Biden’s catastrophic debate performance, by which time it was too late.

I spoke with Tapper on Wednesday, days after news that Biden was diagnosed with prostate cancer, about the book’s genesis, why it’s important to revisit Biden’s legacy amid Trump’s assault on democracy, and the journalistic reckoning he believes must take place.

This is a sensitive subject, but what do you make of the timing of Biden’s diagnosis, given everything else you uncovered while reporting and writing this book? As an example of the skepticism floating around, I saw that Joe Scarborough, once a vigorous Biden defender, was incredulous that Biden hadn’t taken a PSA test — which could have detected his cancer earlier — since 2014. He said that Biden’s claim not to have done so is “either a lie or extraordinarily reckless.” Does it raise your suspicions at all?
I don’t have any reporting to suggest that it’s anything other than how it appears, but I will say that there’s a reason that the public is skeptical when officials disclose health information, and that’s because there is a long, sad history in this country of politicians not being honest about ailments and infirmities. It’s not just President Biden, although obviously our book is about that. Whether it’s Strom Thurmond or Dianne Feinstein, or Kay Granger —

Woodrow Wilson …
You can go back. George Washington, if you want to take it all the way back. And so the reason why the public is often skeptical about what they’re told about the health of public officials is because public officials have for literally centuries given them reason to be skeptical. That said, obviously, we all are sending our best wishes and thoughts to the Biden family and hope that he beats this. But I don’t have any reporting suggesting that it’s anything other than the family disclosing something as soon as they learned it.

The party line with Biden for a long time was that he may appear frail, he may meander in various public settings and so forth, but he was perfectly capable of doing the actual job. Now, obviously, communications and presentation are a huge part of the presidency. I think arguing otherwise is silly. But what made you convinced that he couldn’t do the policy nuts-and-bolts component?
Well, it’s not what I think, or what Alex, my co-author, thinks; it’s what people close to Biden thought. We have Cabinet secretaries in the book saying that by the end of the Biden presidency, they did not have confidence that he would be able to handle that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call with a national security emergency. We have U.S. senators who had encounters with Biden that made them wonder how much he was up to speed on terrorism, how much he was able to manage the portfolio on immigration. So it’s not really about my opinion, it’s about what people who love Joe Biden and who believed in Joe Biden and supported his policies, told us were their concerns.

Beyond Biden himself, the people who really come out badly in the book are the so-called Politburo, his inner circle that includes Jill and Hunter Biden, Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, and Ron Klain. I’m wondering if any of these people have expressed doubt or regret to you for their role in all this. I was struck by the fact that Donilon, as of February, was still sticking to the line that Democrats made a huge mistake pushing Biden out, which flies in the face of every piece of evidence. 
These individuals are still publicly making the argument that Joe........

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