Front Burner - The ‘cover-up’ of Joe Biden’s decline

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Last June, during the first presidential debate of the 2024 U.S. election campaign, Joe Biden stumbled and struggled to find the right words. His performance was described as disastrous and incoherent.At that point, many Americans had already come to the conclusion that Biden was too old for the job. But for those who hadn't yet, the debate was the moment that fact became impossible to deny.Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again is a new book that investigates Biden’s cognitive and physical decline in recent years, and the attempt by a small group of loyalists and family members to keep it from public view.Journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson did over two hundred interviews with lawmakers, White House officials, and campaign insiders for it.Despite the reporting, Joe Biden continues to reject concerns about his age. His recent diagnosis of an aggressive prostate cancer has brought his health back into the spotlight.Today on Front Burner, Axios’ National Political Correspondent Alex Thompson on his new book, and the political consequences of Joe Biden’s decline.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Canadians have plenty of reasons to pay attention right now, but not everyone has a daily news habit. So if you're hoping to build one, we're here to make that really easy. I'm Marcia Young. I'm John Northcott and we host World Report. Give us 10 minutes every morning and we'll give you the biggest stories happening in Canada and around the globe. Whether you're tracking Trump's latest tariff threats, election season in Canada, or how the war in Ukraine is changing, we'll help you understand what's going on.

You can find and follow World Report wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Elaine Chao in for Jamie Poisson. Almost a year ago, Donald Trump and Joe Biden took the stage in the first presidential debate of the 2024 U.S. election campaign. It was a disastrous night for Biden, as he stumbled and struggled to find the right words.

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. Biden's face, at certain points, took on a frozen expression. Mouth agape. Many Americans had already come to the conclusion that Biden was too old for the job. But for those who hadn't yet, this was the moment that fact became impossible to deny.

The White House said that it was, quote, a bad night. But we know now that what was on display had been going on for much longer. That conclusion is at the heart of a new book called Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. It's an investigation into Biden's cognitive and physical decline in recent years

and the attempt by a small group of loyalists and family members to keep it from public view. Journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson did over 200 interviews with lawmakers, White House officials, and campaign insiders for the book. Despite the reporting, Joe Biden continues to reject concerns about his age. Since you left office, there have been a number of books

that have come out, deeply sourced from democratic sources, that claim in your final year, there was a dramatic decline in your cognitive abilities. In the final year of your presidency, what is your response to these allegations, or are these sources wrong? They are wrong. There's nothing to sustain that.

His health has been in the spotlight again in recent days. Biden was just diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer. Today, Alex Thompson, National Political Correspondent for Axios, is here to talk about original sin. Hi Alex, such a pleasure to have you on Front Burner. Thanks so much for having me. Hi, Alex. Such a pleasure to have you on Front Burner. Thanks so much for having me. So the book goes back years to track Biden's physical and cognitive decline, really as

far back as 2015 after his son, Bo, died from brain cancer. And can you walk me through how that decline evolved over the years? People that observed Joe Biden in 2017, 2018, 2019, believed, you know, basically told us that they thought he had aged a decade in just two years. One person said it equated Bo's death to watching water on sand, and that was his brain. That it was just something never came back. Now, I would still say that in 2019, 2020,

Joe Biden had way more good days and good hours than bad hours. There were a few things where people were like, huh, that's a little strange. He couldn't remember the name of an aide that had been with him since 1981 in one instance. And then I'd also say that in terms of the decline, the slide, that it really halted when COVID hit.

And that was because he just didn't have to travel as much for about a year and a half, two years. People on the Biden campaign told us that COVID was one of the worst things to happen to the world, but one of the best things to happen for Joe Biden's political prospects. That because they had doubts that he was going to be able to keep up a rigorous

level of campaigning for the general election and he ended up not having to, you know, he I mean, just go back and watch the clips like the Joe Biden of 2020, 2021 is not the same as Joe Biden of 2023. We're going to choose science over fiction. We're going to choose hope over fear. We're going to choose hope over fear. We're going to choose to move forward because they have enormous opportunities to make things better. They had to work hard, to show patience, and be willing to travel over a thousand miles.

You could say even this harder than getting a ticket to the Renaissance tour or Rip Hitton's tour. She's down in, it's kind of warm in Brazil right now. And then, you know, the second, I would say beyond just like the time and the pressures of the job mounting, maybe having to travel more. The second, you know, main sort of psychic blow that accelerated his decline was all of Hunter Biden's legal troubles. We have some breaking news now out of Delaware. The president's son, Hunter Biden, has agreed to plead guilty to two federal misdemeanors for failing to pay his taxes.

That's right. According to court documents, he also faces a separate gun possession charge that will likely be dismissed if he meets certain conditions. You have to remember that Hunter Biden is the only living person from the 1972 accident that killed Joe Biden's wife and daughter, and then Bo and Hunter were seriously injured. And so the combination of a special counsel being appointed to look into Hunter in the summer of 2023, then also him being found guilty, not just the felonies, but guilty in a Delaware courthouse, the state that Joe Biden had dedicated most of his life to. The combination of all those, I think, results in just an accelerated decline.

Something else that stands out to me from the book in terms of looking at some of the signs of the decline, you also mentioned the reliance on teleprompters even for short events, right? And did any people that you spoke to feel like there was a point where the decline prevented Joe Biden from doing the work of the presidency? Like is there a particular incident that really illustrates that in your mind? Well, I think it's a great question because, you know, all politicians use teleprompters in certain ways. All politicians use note cards in certain ways. But there was, and a lot of these tools to help Biden,

eventually became crutches because he was no longer capable. You know, some of these were done very deliberately, but some of these just sort of evolved over time and as he got worse. Now in terms of where, if there's a certain point when people became more and more concerned about his ability to do the job. Now, I will say there are members of the cabinet that have told us and senior administration

officials that believe that in 2021, if Joe Biden had been 20 years younger, the presidency would have been different because his limitations and they basically empowered a lot of staff, often much more progressive staff below him. Joe Biden was like a center-left Democrat his entire career, and he didn't govern that way as president. Some people in the administration believe that if he had been younger, he would have been more in the weeds and more engaged on the steering wheel of the ship. Now, it's sort of unknowable, but there are people that believe

that there were governing consequences to his age early on. Now, the consensus from the people that we talked to in the administration of when it became a real level of concern was by 2024, and we have members of the cabinet that have told us that they would have been worried had there been the ProverReal 2 a.m. phone call, need to do a crisis, that basically his good days, bad days,

good hours, bad hours, the bad hours had become bad enough that they worried about that there would be a crisis during the bad hours and he was not up to it. Right. There was a moment as well, a meeting around Ukraine aid and I think the testimony there that he wasn't quite able to communicate about what he wanted to see happen, right? Yes. And there's a few different meetings. There's also a phone call with Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, where he's talking about Guantanamo detainees. And Biden just doesn't seem to really know what's going on. And that sort of troubles him.

Then you have Senator Michael Bennett, Democrat of Colorado, who goes to an immigration event and realizes that, in his opinion, that the administration's immigration policy is incoherent, in part because just Biden is not capable of dealing with the various factions on the issue that his age has basically just led him not to be capable anymore of dealing with these complex and thorny issues. One phrase that comes up over and over again from his team whenever there were questions about Biden's health

or age was that he's fine, like just tired, a bit under the weather. That was essentially the explanation given when he didn't recognize George Clooney at a fundraiser that Clooney was organizing for him when he called French President Emmanuel Macron Mitterrand. Right after I was elected, I went to what they call a G7 meeting, all the NATO leaders. And I sat down and I said, America's back. And Mitterrand from Germany, I mean, from France looked at me and said, you know, how long long you back for?

What did AIDS tell you about what was going on behind the scenes and how his schedule was being managed at that time that these incidents were happening? So I started reporting on the way that they were shielding him as far back as 2021. But in spring of 2023, it was the first time when sources began becoming candid with me about his limitations. And it was because there was concern among the aides that not just that he couldn't do the job till January 2029, which very few administration officials when they're being candid really believed that.

But these people inside the Biden White House were seeing the way that the White House was adapting to his limitations and were concerned he could not run a robust campaign for reelection. So the schedule is like one of the first things they flagged. They were like, we cannot almost ever get anything on the schedule before 10 a.m. or after 4 p.m. That it is almost impossible he often will go up to

the residence around, you know, five and then we'll never see him the rest of the day. And so there was increasing frustration with not being able to actually put in a robust private schedule. And there was also concern about what this could mean for the reelection. So I basically wrote that the president, that internally people are frustrated with his limited schedule. And the White House's response was to deny it, to say it was false, to say that there was no basis and truth to it.

And they continued that pattern of insisting he was as sharp as ever, he's running circles around his staff, we can't keep up with them. They insisted on continuing that line until, unfortunately for Joe Biden, the whole world saw that that was not true. It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olsen first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer. I knew I was killing the children, but I couldn't stop myself.

Now it's time to unearth the tapes because I believe there are still answers to be found. I'm Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncover, Calls from a Killer, available now. The book doesn't only look at Biden's decline, but also, as you state in your title, the cover-up. The war choice on that, what led you to call it that? Well, to be clear, we're not calling it a crime. I think some people draw comparisons to Watergate or insinuate that, and that's not what we're doing. The reason we called it a cover-up is because millions

and tens of millions of people were shocked at the significance of the decline at that debate. People had seen that he was aging, but I think the book very try to hide that version of Biden from the American people, from other members of the Democratic Party, and even from members of their own cabinet and senior staff. And I guess the thing is like, if it's not a cover up, then people would not have been so shocked by the extent of the decline at the debate. And who was doing the hiding? Because obviously there are a lot of people following orders, but there are some key players here as well that you note in the book.

Yes, there are two main powerful groups in this White House. One is what some people in the administration refer to as the Pull-up Bureau. These are people that have been with Joe Biden for a long time. That's Mike Donilon, Steve Aschetti, Bruce Reed. At times, Ron Klain, Joe Biden's first chief of staff, who also led debate prep and wanted Joe Biden to stay in the race. And then the other group is sort of, I'd say like the family and the family enforcers. So that would be Jill Biden, Hunter, Jill Biden's chief of staff.

His name is Anthony Bernal, who may go down in history as the most powerful first lady chief of staff in history. The amount of influence he had over West Wing operations was incredibly unusual and only grew over time as they both shielded him and as it became more and more insular with only the most loyal aides allowed. And he was deputy campaign manager for 2020, is that right? Yes, that's right. Can I remember that correctly? Yes, which is also unusual for the top aide to the spouse to be a deputy campaign manager

on a presidential campaign. And then his deputy, who's also like sort of a traveling chief of staff to Joe Biden, he eventually became deputy chief of staff of the White House, Annie Tomasini. Jill Biden in particular has had tremendous influence as you present in the book. And can you just tell me a little bit more about her role in all of this? Yeah, her arc is really interesting because she used to be a very unwilling political spouse. She was unenthusiastic about him running for president. There's a funny story in 2004, or 2003 when he was thinking about running in 2004, she walked through a presidential planning meeting

in a bikini with a Sharpie having scrawled no on her stomach to make clear her feelings about a presidential run. But this changes by around 2017, 2018. She becomes an incredibly enthusiastic political partner. Last time you were on the show, you mentioned you do not love the title of second lady. And you have a title you prefer. Yes, captain of the Vice Squad.

Captain of the Vice Squad. But you have an alternate title as well, yes, Mr. Vice President? None that I can say." -"Oh, good." -"Really?" -"They're all endearing." -"They're all endearing, but you can't say it." There you go. -"He's not Trump." -"Okay, there you go."

It's not that she had certain policy goals. If anything, she saw her role as, like, his enforcer, as a loyal, loyalty arbiter. And that had tremendous effects on personnel throughout the administration. It had tremendous effects on the daily schedule. And she was also a huge supporter of him running for reelection. And one of the sort of striking things about the process of the decision, which we think is one of the most consequ striking things about the process of the decision, which we think is one of the most consequential decisions of the 2024 election, but also maybe of American

history was how little process there was. And that nobody got in Joe Biden's face and said, I'm not sure you're up to this. And really tried to stress test the idea. And part of the reason was because of a culture of loyalty that had been set up in part with the First Lady to basically say, if you're questioning this, maybe you're not on the team. You described it as almost a theology, right? Yeah, it's like a mythology that sort of morphed into a much more more uncrackable theology. And the first commandment,

if you'll indulge me in continuing the metaphor, is the first commandment is like Joe Biden always comes back. Anyone that questioned was deemed a heretic and slowly but surely pushed out. One of the few times where Biden's decline really made it into the headlines and stayed there for a while was around the release of the Robert Herr report in February 2024. The Republican special counsel described Biden at the time as a quote well-meaning elderly man with poor memory after interviewing him and I know that you at Axios you've released the audio. Trump gets elected in November of 2017. 2016.

2016. 2016. All right. So, what, 2017? That's when you left office, January 2017. Okay. That's when Trump gets sworn in. Right.

Correct. Okay. And her got hit by just a lot of backlash by Democrats in the White House, was labeled for being politically motivated. And what do you make of the fact that we didn't see mainstream liberal media in particular like pursue this issue of Biden's decline more, even after the Her report?

There's a lot there. I would say there was a little bit, you know, the Wall Street Journal, obviously they started their investigation that published in June of 2024 after the Her report. I would also say like I continue to cover it aggressively, but to your point about why do I think there wasn't more? I mean, I think if you go back and you look at the headlines after the Her transcript was released, the vast majority of them, they're nuanced.

They're like, you know, there's, you know, it shows Joe Biden having some verbal stumbles, but also some moments of clarity. And you know, like the, you know, it shows Joe Biden having some verbal stumbles, but also some moments of clarity. And, you know, like the bar had been lowered so much that they, I think a lot of the headlines and a lot of the stories and reporting around her will have, have none and will not age well. I should also say, like, there was a lot of coverage about Joe Biden's age. And there also was a lot of good reporting about Joe Biden's age, but the majority of the coverage was about it being a political liability, not about his ability to do the job and how he was being, how he was increasingly limited in his ability to do the job.

And there wasn't enough of that coverage. But her was grilled by both Republicans. Joe Biden broke the law, but because he's a forgetful old man who would appear sympathetic to a jury, Mr. Herr chose not to bring charges. And Democrats. You chose a general pejorative reference to the president. You understood when you made that decision, didn't you, Mr. Herr, that you would ignite a political firestorm with that language, didn't you? Congressman, politics played no part whatsoever in my investigative steps. Most reporters, obviously, that cover Biden, they live in DC. DC is a very liberal place. I think sometimes reporters let their own personal political beliefs probably influence their

reporting. I think also the White House was lying, if not like purposely, at least to themselves, but the lie is a lie. And like, you know, if your sources are lying to you, you know, that makes it difficult. I also think there is like something to like, and it's happened before and will happen again. I think there's also a little something to like Washington reporter group think that I think sets in sometimes. And I think there was complicity. No, I think there was like a lack of there was not sufficient skepticism and curiosity. I think it's a good reminder, Like every white, it varies to degrees, but every White House lies.

And I think there was just a lack of skepticism about this issue. You have heard all this a lot in recent days and doing interviews on the book. Your co-author, Jake Tapper from CNN, has also been confronted with some of these questions from Fox News host, Megyn Kelly, for example. You know as well as I do that there's a way of you can say, hey, there's this poll on

your age, or you could say, you just forgot that Jackie Wolorski was dead. This happened 13 days before you sat with him. There is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience, and you didn't do it. That's correct. I didn't. This has come up quite a bit. Yeah. They're fair questions.

Listen, if you are like the voters were ahead and the voters didn't even know what was going behind the scenes. They just had two eyes and we're watching him. Right. And like the voters were ahead of both the mainstream media and Democratic elites. The majority Democrats did not think Joe Biden was up to this. And I think if you're a Republican or an independent or a Democrat that is going like and democratic elites. The majority of Democrats did not think Joe Biden was up to this. And I think if you're a Republican or an independent or a Democrat that is going like, what are

we doing and why am I not seeing it reflected in the media, you have a right to like be a little disillusioned or a little frustrated. And Jake has already spoken to this too, that he feels like, and Jake never carried the Biden team's water on anything as far as I'm concerned, but I think he's also said, I should have done better. And I'm of the belief that especially when you're a reporter and your entire thing is people trusting you, when you make errors, you admit them and that builds trust. I mean, I covered this pretty aggressively, but I still think after we did this book, I was

like, you know, just censor myself for Canadian radio. Like holy cow, you know, I was like, I was aggressive on this and I missed it. And so anyway. I want to talk to you about some of the bigger kind of implications here. You know, obviously the health of public servants, especially, you know, the president is meant to undergo a lot of scrutiny. In February 2024, when he was still president, Biden's longtime doctor declared him fit to serve after he underwent a routine physical but he was never subject to a cognitive test. The White House spokesperson at the

time said that he passes a cognitive test every day. And having reported so much on the issue, like, you know, what are the limitations of such tests and could the issue of decline perhaps have come up earlier if these tests were different? Yeah, some doctors told us the only reason you wouldn't take a test is because you don't want to know the diagnosis. And they're very simple tests. Now, you know, Dr. O'Connor will say that those tests are usually designed for physicians that only

see their patient every six months, and he did see them every day. But it is still conspicuous that the most, the oldest president in history, which was not given one, and I think there's going to be more scrutiny on Dr. O'Connor and everything else with this recent cancer diagnosis. Now, I think there's a broader point that we try to make in the book that this is not just about Joe Biden, that we have had several presidents

basically do their own coverup of their own health. Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and was really not up to the job for the last year and a half of his presidency. FDR had no business running for a fourth term in 1944. He won, but then he didn't even bring in Truman to know what was going on with the war effort. And it was incredibly reckless. JFK lied about having Addison's disease. And I guess there's this broader point of there is no mechanism for transparency of presidential health in this country. They can lie, they can also just not release anything.

And given the power that the presidency has in the nuclear age, it just seems crazy. And it will happen again without some sort of forcing mechanism. So that's sort of like a broader point about presidential health and disclosures. And we don't know almost anything about Donald Trump's health either. He's released very little and even if he's released it, it's unclear if it's true. And he began his presidency older than Joe Biden was when he began his presidency.

So this is going to be an issue. It will happen again. And so that was sort of our like broader, like, let's try to, you know, make a bigger point than just about Biden. Just coming back to Biden quickly here, I mean, you mentioned the aggressive prostate cancer diagnosis. Biden's last known blood test for prostate cancer was more than a decade ago. It's a very late stage cancer that we know. And I know you've been doing some reporting on this. Is there any evidence at this point that there was a covering up around this cancer? We don't have any evidence right now. I will say we are still reporting it out. But the consensus even among doctors

that served on Joe Biden's COVID team is that either that it's almost certain, given how late stage the cancer is, that he had cancer while he was president. Now either they missed it or they didn't miss it and then didn't disclose it. I guess it's theoretically possible he only got this the last hundred days but it's unlikely and so that's you know I think like a question that we're gonna continue to

look into. Alex, you know you make the argument in the book that the original sin was Biden's choice in running again. Back in the spring of 2020, Biden had described himself as a bridge to a new generation of leaders. What do you think ultimately changed that? And what are some of the unintended consequences of this original sin on US politics? What changed it was someone close to Biden put it to us this way. He has nothing if not for this.

He's won the presidency most of his entire life. And you don't, it's heady stuff. I mean, it's a tale as old as every single powerful leader in history that it's an aphrodisiac and it got to his head. And he saw the world, you know, Putin on the march, parts of the world on fire, the threat of Trump and thought that he was the indispensable man, the only one that beat Trump, the only one that can beat Trump. I think that is what changed.

I'd also say, I don't really even know how much he ever intended to actually be a bridge. I think he was saying that at the time to try to win the presidential primary and without making an explicit promise. As for the consequences to politics, the thesis of the book, and some Democrats and liberals

have asked us, well, why are we focusing on this now, given everything that Trump is doing? And honestly, the question in our minds, we were like, so how did Trump come back? And Trump obviously did, you know, had his own sort of tactical things on this side. But Jake and I's sort of thesis is that the most consequential moment of this election was Joe Biden running again. Because in some ways, Democrats semi-forfeited, right? Where it's like they had to swap out a nominee at the very last second, and that's not an ideal way to run a presidential campaign.

And well, also, when Biden is insisting that there's no daylight between, you know, Kamala Harris, right? Yes, exactly. I mean, the whole thing is a mess, but like, and you can, like the Kamala campaign, you could write a whole book about all the mistakes they made, but we felt like the most important consequential decision was Joe Biden decided to run. And so if you're looking around at everything that Donald Trump is doing, we think these are the consequences of that decision. And it's not just and also want to make clear, it's not just Joe Biden, it's the entire Democratic Party. There, I think the book shows very conclusively

that members of the Democratic Party have serious reasons for concern. They saw him behind closed doors and were concerned. And they didn't speak up. And you know, Democrats often mock Republicans for saying one thing in private about Donald Trump and another sort of dear leader attitude in public. Well, they did very much the same thing the last two years with Joe Biden. Alex Thompson, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks so much for having me. That's all for having me.

That's all for today. I'm Elaine Chao. Thanks for listening to cbc.ca slash podcasts.