Joe Biden lost it before he even won the presidency.

This is the most notable revelation in Original Sin, a new book-length exposé of the Biden White House by Axios’s Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Thompson and Tapper mostly fill in the details of a story we already knew: Biden’s cognition declined sharply over his final two years in office, and his core advisers schemed to disguise this reality from donors, Democratic officials, and the public.

But the authors also vindicate those who believed that Biden was already in rough shape before he ever won the presidency. Their book suggests that the former president’s cognitive decline began after the tragic death of his son Beau from brain cancer in 2015. By December 2019, Biden was having difficulty remembering the name of his top adviser Mike Donilon, whom he’d worked with for 38 years, and conducting coherent conversations with voters over Zoom.

Original Sin is a sad book, made all the sadder by this week’s news that Biden has metastatic prostate cancer. It is also an infuriating read that illuminates the selfishness and self-delusions that led an unwell octogenarian to run for a second presidential term — and a team of sycophantic advisers to conceal his condition from the public (and possibly, even from himself).

This story was first featured in The Rebuild.

Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz.

This said, Original Sin’s core argument — that Biden’s reluctance to retire was the primary cause of Democrats’ defeat in 2024 — is unconvincing.

Thompson and Tapper argue that had Biden ducked out of the 2024 race in a timely manner, “a competitive primary and caucus process would have produced a stronger Democratic nominee, one who had more experience with debates and taking questions from reporters, one with a more cogent and precise answer as to why they were running, one with time to introduce themselves to the American people.”

But the idea that competitive primaries inevitably elevate strong candidates — and/or make mediocre ones better — is undermined by the book’s own reporting.

In truth, had Biden dropped out earlier, Democrats plausibly could have........

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