Wednesday, May 28, 2025

Part I

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So Who Knew What When About Biden’s Cognitive Decline? ‘Original Sin’ Has Revised History and Is Raising Big Questions About Who’s Responsible for This Cover-Up

Well, it’s been just a few days since the release of the book entitled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. The book is by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, and it’s already making its way to the bestseller list. And of course, it is the topic of conversation in political circles in the United States. It was destined to be so, because we’re talking about one of the most important questions and, indeed if a coverup, one of the most important coverups in American presidential history. And to some degree it undoubtedly was a coverup, but that led the satirical website known as The Babylon Bee to put out an item. And the headline is this, “Jake Tapper uncovers startling evidence that Biden’s decline was covered up by Jake Tapper.”

This does underline the fact that the complicity in this coverup was absolutely massive. We’re talking about the White House. So let’s just think about it for a moment. Even when you look at ancient dictators, you look at totalitarian leaders, you look at enthroned monarchs, what do you see? You see constant people around them. You see those who are more intimate. You see those who are more distant. You see those who are more powerful. You see the ones who are weaker. You see the ones that have greater access, and no doubt, some who have lesser access. But the point is there are always those who are in an inner circle. There are always those who have a lot of access. And it turns out that in this case, there were a lot of those who were engaged in the great lie and coverup about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.

This is a massively important story. In terms of American politics, it’s hard to come up with anything that could be more pressing and more significant. So much power, so much authority and responsibility is invested in the nation’s chief executive. When you look at the presidency itself, even those who framed the Constitution, going back to the 18th century recognized that they were in effect creating something like an elected monarch. Now, they put in place limitations. They made clear that the President is not a monarch, which by the way led to all kinds of questions, like what are you going to call them? And thus it was George Washington himself, who set the pattern in so many other ways, who established the pattern of referring to the President as Mr. President, introducing him as, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

But still, when you look at the presidency in terms of American politics now, it’s far more powerful than any monarchy on earth. The founders put in a Constitutional limitation by separation of powers. There are term limits, there are other limitations on presidential power, but the fact is they made the presidency absolutely essential to the day-to-day governance of the nation. As a matter of fact, that was one of the key arguments for the presidency. You have the legislature, you have both the House and the Senate, but they meet in session. Their systems can often come down to some kind of legislative deadlock.

And when it comes to making decisions about something as important as, let’s just be clear, national security, then you need a chief executive who can put the military into action, who can respond to threats. And when it comes to actually running the government, well, that is something that is implausible when it comes to congressional oversight. Just keep in mind that congressional oversight is always retrospective. It’s always looking back at what someone did and asking if that was what should be done. Congress is basically in no position to look at the immediate present moment, nor even more so to look to the future.

So when you look at the stakes that are invested in the presidency, in the nation’s chief executive, you clearly see the danger of having someone who is mentally incapacitated. And what’s really interesting right now is that days after the release of this book, it has been so successful, and of course it isn’t alone, but this book nonetheless has been very successful in changing the conversation. There is now virtually no debate anywhere about the question as to whether or not there was cognitive decline. It’s also interesting to see that we’re even beyond where many thought we might be right now, and that is that there’s very little debate about how bad the President’s cognitive decline was, speaking of President Joe Biden. The big question now is who saw it and who didn’t? Who was responsible? Who was it who covered it up?

Inevitably, members of the President’s family are going to be on the front line in terms of responsibility here, and in particular that means Dr. Jill Biden, who was the First Lady, who was married to President Biden, and who clearly was not only covering up for his cognitive decline but was, you can put no other spin on it, lying to the public and even to members of the administration about the nature of that decline. She was also clearly encouraging Joe Biden to run for a second term in office, which, as this book makes clear and even Democratic figures are saying now, is absolutely implausible. But it also raises the question, who knew what when back in say 2019 and 2020?

Remember, that it was only under the unusual unprecedented circumstances of COVID that the Biden campaign claimed that it would set the example by the President basically campaigning from his basement when it came to his house in Delaware. In retrospect, it’s clear what was taking place was the establishment of a pattern of a cover-up. But it is interesting that we’ve now reached the point where there are huge questions being asked about, for example, national security and foreign policy, and there are few people better equipped to address that question than Walter Russell Mead who wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal. It was entitled “Original Sin,” that’s the title of the book, “and Foreign Policy.” Well, all you have to know about where the article is headed is to look at the subhead in the article, “America is paying for having had a severely diminished President during a perilous era.”

Now, when you watch a situation like this, an issue like this begin to unfold, one of the things you need to see is that there’s denial and then there is something of an admission and then the facts just flow out. The ramifications just flow out. Further information just begins to flow. When you have Walter Russell Mead writing an article in which there is just the assessment that we had a severely diminished President and that the nation was at risk during a perilous era, well, you have a situation here in which there is going to be an awful lot of argument and a good deal of disclosure. Mead is an expert on national security and American foreign policy, and he writes this, “The most remarkable thing about Original Sin to this reader was the near-total absence of President Biden’s foreign policy team from the account.”

He goes on, “This isn’t because they weren’t around or in the know. Messrs. Tapper and Thompson emphasized that both Antony Blinken,” he was the Secretary of State, “and Jake Sullivan,” the President’s national security advisor, “had better and more regular access to the increasingly walled-off President than any other cabinet secretaries or senior aides beyond the inner ring of Biden loyalists that the authors call the Politburo.” He then offers this stunner. “We also know from many sources that European leaders were worried and puzzled by Mr. Biden’s irregular behavior at international meetings. Yet,” he says, “Original Sin focuses much less scrutiny on Mr. Biden’s foreign policy team’s actions and omissions than those of his domestic advisors.”

Okay, let’s just stop here and take stock of what Walter Russell Mead is telling us. He’s telling us that the foreign policy team that was Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, they had a lot of exposure to the President, which means they knew the cognitive decline. The question is why would they, given their responsibilities, National security and foreign policy in a time of incredibly perilous developments, why did they keep this a secret? He says this. “There are good reasons why the foreign policy team might have rallied around an ailing President. Mr. Biden reserved much of his fading energy for foreign policy and likely was more effective in foreign policy staff meetings than in other meetings or on other topics.” He also says this. “And if you are a presidential advisor, you might not think that patriotism required you to broadcast a leader’s failings to the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisors kept their lips tightly sealed in 1944 and 1945.” Mead then says, “Perhaps Mr. Biden’s closest staffers chose to follow their example.”

Well, it’s also very interesting that Walter Russell Mead says that when you look at the Original Sin book, it’s very clear that the authors point to the domestic policy team and argue openly that they took advantage. They were progressives who took advantage of the President’s cognitive decline, and thus disengagement, and pushed through very progressive domestic policy agendas that Joe Biden might not have pressed so aggressively had he been in full control, or might have actually temporized to some degree. That’s impossible to say now, but it is interesting that the authors of the book make clear that it was Liberal policy advisors who took advantage on the domestic side.

What happened on the foreign policy side? Well, Mr. Mead was also an observer. He said this. “At the time, it seemed to me that Mr. Biden’s intellectual fingerprints were all over foreign policy, that the aides and officials devising and implementing policy were staying within Mr. Biden’s red lines, conforming to his instinctive preferences and giving us a genuinely Biden-esque policy.” He then says, “Nothing in Original Sin makes me revisit that argument.” But he acknowledges the question remains. This is what he asked. “What price did America pay for having an increasingly diminished man in the Oval Office at a time of growing international danger?”

That underlines something important. As I said, this is a morality tale. It’s not just about politics. It’s not just about history, political science, controversy. It’s about morality. Covering up a President’s cognitive decline is a moral failure. It’s more than that. That’s why you have the Original Sin title raising the issue of a cover-up. You don’t cover up something good and righteous. You cover up something that is clearly a problem, it’s clearly misbehavior or it’s clearly an inadequacy. In this case, an inadequacy in the most powerful office in the land. But it is only powerfully effective for the national security and safety of the United States and our interests around the world if the President is in full cognitive power. Otherwise, when you have a cover-up like this, it puts the entire nation in danger.

That’s the point that Walter Russell Mead is making here. Listen to these words. “What we needed most from Joe Biden were the two things he could no longer deliver. The first was genuine national leadership. As the threats from an unholy China-Russia partnership rose, America needed a President who could see the problem whole and articulate it convincingly to the public.” He went on to say, “This is something Mr. Biden would have struggled with even if he were in full possession of his capacities. It was utterly beyond him in his diminished state.” That is a truly horrifying sentence. That exposes a great danger to which the United States was subjected.

Then the second thing he says is we needed creative strategies when it comes to national security and foreign policy. “Threats like Russia’s escalating threats against Ukraine required much more than the limp gestures and feeble diplomacy that failed to deter the most dangerous conflict in Europe since World War II. Unconventional power moves like Russia’s use of the Wagner Group to steamroll across Africa demanded an out-of-the-box response. China’s military buildup certainly required a more nimble and forceful American strategy than Mr. Biden was able to provide.”

He goes on to say that, at his best, President Biden was at least somewhat able to rise to the occasion on some occasions. But he says on other occasions, that was clearly not the case. And he makes the point that Xi Jinping in China and Vladimir Putin in Russia didn’t have to worry about President Joe Biden of the United States coming up with out-of-the-box creative responsive strategies. Honestly, there’s no way of knowing if, when President Trump says had he been reelected, this would never have happened, Russia wouldn’t have been invaded Ukraine. That’s something we will never know. But what we do know is that Russia invaded Ukraine during the presidency of Joe Biden and that Biden’s response was, if anything, inadequate.

The Journal also released a pretty comprehensive review of the Original Sin book. Tunku Varadarajan writes the review, and he points out several things that have now become just a part of the consensus after the publication of the book and some of the revelations that have come. Number one, the President was “frequently incoherent and rambling when he spoke. He lost his recall for names and faces.” Listen to this. “Pictures from the D-Day Commemoration in June 2024 showed that Mr. Biden was no more mobile than many of the World War II veterans. Yet,” he says, “the alarm bells were mostly silent.”

Now, remember that Babylon Bee headline, “Jake Tapper uncovers startling evidence that Biden’s decline was covered up by Jake Tapper”? Well, Varadarajan goes right at it. “Mr. Tapper isn’t himself blameless, being a part of a Liberal media consensus that believed it would be unseemly, if not taboo, to show too much interest in Mr. Biden’s mental state. To do so, it was feared, would play into Donald Trump’s hands.”

Well, that’s revelatory in itself, and it also really comes out in the Original Sin book; the at least open accusation, which is often offered as something of an explanation by those who were hiding the President’s cognitive decline, that they felt that Joe Biden was all that stood between the presidency and Donald Trump. Now, the fact they thought that way might be plausible, but the fact is that doesn’t make the cover-up any more morally right. If anything, it just means that it was straightforwardly blatantly political, as well as personal.

Varadarajan also makes clear, and this is very important for the writing of history, that the special prosecutor who was given such a tough time, Robert Hur, the special prosecutor in the documents case, who reported that the President in the interview that he had with him five hours over two days came across as “a sympathetic well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” He was torn up by Democratic politicians for saying that. But they pretty much openly acknowledge now that the special counsel was speaking truthfully, perhaps even, at the time, in a way that could have been helpfully.

Varadarajan acknowledges the hints that “a hush-hush leftist capture of an infirmed President,” but he goes on to say there’s a bigger cover-up perhaps here if there was a conspiracy. “If it was, then Jill Biden, who told the White House staff to call her Dr. B, must have been among the most potent conspirators.” Varadarajan continues, “She was, Messrs Tapper and Thompson wrote, ‘one of the chief supporters of the President’s decision to run for re-election and one of the chief deniers of his deterioration.'” He then says, “They attribute this drive to the purest motives. All she ever wanted to do was love Joe.” Varadarajan then writes, “Lady Macbeth loved her husband too.”

We’ll wrap this up for today by just underlining the fact that there are deep moral questions very much in play here. There’s another question for us, and that is what’s going to happen next? And it’s going to be interesting to see if this is merely a journalistic investigation or if some point this becomes something of a more formal investigative issue. Given the fact that the former President has now been given a very significant and daunting medical diagnosis, all that may be largely hypothetical. But the point is the moral issues do remain.

One further worldview consideration here is that we often create policies and procedures only after there’s been a problem. You put up the “Do Not” sign only after someone’s done something. And so when you look at a situation like this, it is probable that there will be some kind of new structure, some kind of new process. For example, there are those who are saying we are far beyond the President just having a personal physician, a presidential White House physician to certify his health. There needs to be a far larger medical body or a body of medical consideration to reach that kind of a judgment.

The nation’s now going to demand more of Presidents, and, quite frankly, Presidents are going to resist that, and that undoubtedly includes the current President of the United States, Donald J. Trump. No one wants his medical history or medical condition openly discussed in these ways. But sometimes something happens, and after that point you’re going to have to discuss it. After the point of this kind, of what we now know as a presidential crisis, on the other side, this is always now going to be talked about.

Part II

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The ‘Unreliable Boyfriend’ Problem? UK Prime Minister Starmer Appears to Have a Conviction Problem

Well, all right, let’s now shift from considering the American presidency and look at the Office of the Prime Minister in the United Kingdom. The British Prime Minister at this point is a Labor Prime Minister. That’s the more Liberal Party. Keir Starmer is the politician who is now the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister’s head of government, not head of state. The King is head of state. But the Prime Minister is the most powerful political official in the land. And simply because the Prime Minister is Prime Minister because of a majority in Parliament, that means that he is, in effect, able to push legislation and at least hypothetically should never lose.

But his own Liberal Party, and that’s the Labor Party officially there in the United Kingdom as well as others, and this is filtering down to the general population, they’re wondering exactly what Keir Starmer stands for. And my interest in this is not so much Keir Starmer, it’s not so much the Office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, it is the phenomenon that is now being openly discussed about the British Prime Minister. Because when it comes to leadership and conviction, well, this applies to every leader in every role and it underlines the importance of conviction.

I believe that leadership comes down to the translation of conviction into action and the sharing of convictions with others for mutual action, and when you have leadership with questionable conviction, well, that ends up being questionable leadership. But the metaphor that the Financial Times of Britain used in the case recently of an article about Keir Starmer, it’s a very colorful metaphor that I think will be helpful to us in thinking about the responsibilities of leadership and the necessity of conviction. The headline is this. “Starmer’s unreliable boyfriend issue.”

An unreliable boyfriend issue? Well, the Financial Times is not insinuating that the very married British Prime Minister has a boyfriend on the side. That’s not the point. He is, in this metaphor, the boyfriend. The unreliable boyfriend problem is the problem of having an unreliable boyfriend. Robert Shrimsley is the author of the article and he picks up on this cultural metaphor, and he says, “When many women are in conversation about their boyfriends, they often wonder if their boyfriend is absolutely faithful, or even more, perhaps, whether he’s absolutely reliable.” In other words, is the boyfriend merely telling the young woman what she wants to hear? Is he merely making promises he never intends to fulfill? Is he, so to speak, leading her along?

Well, all of us can understand that that script can happen, but the fact that it’s applied to a politician, well, that’s a very interesting thing. Because what’s being asked here is whether or not the British Prime Minister has any convictions at all. And when it comes to the unreliable boyfriend problem, that’s being asked more by his own party, his own colleagues, and they’re asking, “When it comes to policy, when it comes to ideology, when it comes to direction, is the Prime Minister just telling us what he thinks we want to hear, over and over again? When he speaks to different groups, is he just telling all those different groups what they want to hear?”

This is a rather common accusation made against politicians. They just tell various groups what they want to hear, or at least enough of what they want to hear to get their support, or if not that, at least to give them enough of what they want to hear that they wouldn’t be an active opposition. And I nonetheless have not seen this metaphor, the unreliable boyfriend problem, I’ve not seen that addressed to a politician before, but when you think about it, it really sticks.

When you think about leadership, and let’s just think about leadership in a political sense, and so let’s just switch back from the British Prime Minister line to the American presidential line. One of the ways you can divide American Presidents is between those who are more conventional politicians and those who were convictional politicians. The convictional politicians didn’t want to be elected President in order to be President. They wanted to be elected President in order to do something. Now, in conviction Presidents, and I would offer that they are the fewer here, they’re in the minority of the American Presidents, you have someone like a Ronald Reagan, who in 1980 was elected President because he wanted to do something and he told the American people what he would do. He was committed to a set of convictions.

Communism is evil and should be confronted. America needs a powerful national defense that needs to be expanded and updated. When you look at fiscal policy, we need to rein in spending and we need to control taxation. We need to avoid having a debt and a budget that simply spirals out of control. These were convictions that he put before the American people, and they were convictions that had been honed out over years of just hammering out those ideas and those convictions, being in conversation, reading books, being a part of the political conversation, being the Governor of California.

It was very clear that if elected President, Ronald Reagan was going to be a convictional President. Just as at very much nearly the same time, you had Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister in the United Kingdom, also elected as a conviction politician. She had been saying for years what she would do, precisely because she had been telling the British people and her party for years what it is that she believed.

When you look at criticisms of Ronald Reagan, sometimes he’s criticized for deviating from those convictions. When you look at the presidency, there are times when every occupant of the Oval Office has to dodge around and negotiate somewhat. But over the long haul, the enemies and the friends of Ronald Reagan didn’t accuse him by and large of lacking convictions, but frankly, often they lacked having the same convictions. When it came to Margaret Thatcher, it was even more glaring. There were those who hated her when she was the British Prime Minister, and it wasn’t so much because she was Margaret Thatcher, but because they hated her ideas. On the other hand, when it comes to the ideas both of those politicians held, they really did change history.

Shrimsley writes about the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “Starmer’s utilitarianism leaves the relationship suffering from unreliable boyfriend syndrome. Voters, and indeed many of his own party, aren’t sure where his commitment lies or if he is solely guided by opinion polls.” As if to make the point of the Financial Times article, John Harris, writing in The Guardian, that’s from the left in Britain, offered an article with this statement. “Only with a positive vision can Starmer lift Labor out of the weeds.” In other words, this is someone from the left saying exactly what the Financial Times was saying from the center or the right, and that is the Keir Starmer situation is one of a lack of convictions, at least so far, and thus his leadership is being criticized for a lack of clear convictions.

If you’re looking at placid times where there are very few issues of consequence being debated, it’s hard to remember if such times ever existed, the fact is that you might just get through as something of a functionary, something of a figurehead, but when the issues are dramatic, when the stakes are high, when the danger is imminent, this kind of political stance just won’t work. You can’t just have a functionary in office when there are emergencies at hand.

Part III

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Christian Leadership is a Call to Conviction – God’s People Need Convictional Leadership

But my point to Christians is a far deeper point. It’s one thing for secular politicians to be asked about in terms of whether or not they have convictions. When it comes to Christians, it is absolutely incompatible with Christian leadership that those we lead would have to ask about our convictions. It is absolute confidence in those convictions that produces the entire platform for, and capacity for, and confidence in leadership, and that’s the way it should be among God’s people. Christian leaders are called to be visionaries, not functionaries.