Original Sin Quotes

“Then there was the Trumpiness of it all. A candidate just didn’t get a whole lot out of debating Trump. Even if you were beating his ass, you would lose part of your soul in that debate. Trump was such a pathological liar that it was hard for anyone to maintain the nature of what they imagined themselves to be. Trump always took you down with him.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“

BIDEN: “Look, folks,” the president told the adoring crowd after his wife handed him the microphone, “you know, there, uh — I shouldn’t say this, but my brother always uses lines from movies. There was a famous movie by John Wayne, and— and he’s working for the, uh, the Northern military, trying to get the Apaches back on the reservation, and they were lying like hell to him. And they’re all sitting on a bluff, and John Wayne was sitting with two Indian — they were, they were tr — Apaches. And one of them looked at John Wayne and said, ‘These guys are nothing but lying, dog-faced pony soldiers.’ ”

The crowd roared and laughed.
“Except, Trump’s just a liar,” Biden added.
No such line was ever said in any John Wayne movie.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“People thought there was some big Democratic Party apparatus making moves, putting people in, setting things up. But it wasn't a chessboard; it was just one old man and his enablers carrying out his every wish.”
― Jake Tapper; Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“One House Democrat was shocked. Biden looked frailer and was shuffling more than many of the World War II veterans who were nearing one hundred.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Obama thought that too many leaders of Biden’s 2020 campaign team were hangers-on and not world-class political consultants. In 2019, he expressed worry about their steering Biden’s campaign. “He’s my friend,” Obama said at the time. “I love him; I don’t want him to be humiliated.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“During an eight-day, grueling bus tour in Iowa in December 2019, Biden gave his aides pause. While doing prep, he struggled to remember the name of longtime aide Mike Donilon. “You know, you know,” he said, groping for it. His aides side-eyed one another—Donilon had worked with Biden since 1981. It wasn’t the only time aides worried during the 2020 presidential primary.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Our most important sources were Democrats inside and outside the White House who were grappling with how so many of them had been so focused on convincing voters that Donald Trump was a true existential threat to the nation that they put blinders on, participating in a charade that delivered the election directly into Trump’s hands.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“March 2, he forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence:”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as president, there were several significant issues that complicated his presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments where he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection—followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“But Biden was not likely to back any other candidate as his successor. He had fumed for years about how Obama hadn’t backed him in 2016; he wouldn’t do the same thing to his vice president.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“But no one went public. One donor who witnessed it all explained their tortured calculus: “We weren’t going to change that he was running, and no one wanted to be on the outside in case he did win. So no one said anything. No one wanted to hear it, and if you said anything, you got your head chopped off.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Many on the Biden team felt that Harris didn’t put in the work and was also just not a very nice person. Several quietly expressed buyer’s remorse: They should have picked Whitmer.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Politics is addictive. It’s exciting. It’s a kind of psychic cocaine…. People don’t want to just go back to their former boring lives.” Unlike athletics or entertainment or business, there are no coaches or producers or boards of directors to intervene—politicians are truly accountable only to their voters, who can be snookered.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” said one person familiar with the internal dynamic. A cabinet secretary expressed a similar sentiment about the Politburo. “I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power. They would make huge economic decisions without calling [Treasury] Secretary Yellen.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, so goes an old saying President John F. Kennedy invoked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Few Democrats were running around claiming paternity of the political wipeout that was the 2024 campaign.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“great respecter of fate. I have seen too much of it in my family related to accidents alone. And so I guarantee you, I guarantee you, I will be totally transparent in terms of my health and all aspects of my health.” He was not.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Yes, when it occurs, when anything occurs. And anything can happen. Anything can happen…. I have become a great respecter of fate, a”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Trump administration, “provide very little granular detail.” As of now, Reiner notes, the information released to the public is only the data that the White House permits to be made public. “But a law could require the president’s doctor to provide a fulsome report, potentially at the penalty of perjury.” Without that enshrined into law, no president can be counted on to be fully open.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“So what do we as a country do to ensure that this will never happen again? Congress could legally require the president’s physician to certify to Congress that the commander in chief is physically and cognitively fit to serve. “Currently, the yearly letter from the president’s doctor is basically a tradition,” Reiner says, adding that some White House physicians have provided very detailed presidential health summaries for the public, while others, such as those in the first”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Reiner feels strongly that “the White House has a responsibility to the public to tell the whole truth about the health of the president. Without that, there can be no trust. Omitting a material diagnosis (such as cognitive impairment or frank dementia) violates that responsibility.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“sooner or later it would declare itself conclusively.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“They were all devastated when they saw the debate, he said. He couldn’t diagnose it—they all had different theories, whether early Lewy body dementia or Alzheimer’s or a combination or something else. Whatever it is, the neurologists said,”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“think, physical decline,” Reiner tells us. “One thing bears mentioning: There actually may not be an established existing diagnosis. The president and his team physician, caring for a unique patient like the president, may have declined to do the kind of cognitive testing and imaging that could have established a formal diagnosis. That way, there wouldn’t be data to be reported. If there’s no diagnosis, there’s nothing to disclose. Personally, I don’t agree with this. The public should be informed of the whole truth. Not selective truth.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“While we don’t have a confirmed diagnosis, it’s apparent that Biden has had a steep cognitive and, I also”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“depends entirely upon pleasing that one man.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Cox wrote that “we should be reminded of the corrupt influence of great power, especially when the power is in the hands of someone who is willing to resort to any tactics, however wrong, to retain and increase his power. Perhaps it is inescapable that modern government vests extraordinary power in the President and puts around him a large circle of men and women whose personal status and satisfaction depends”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Trump ended up winning the Electoral College by 312 to 226 electoral votes, and he secured the popular vote by more than 2.2 million. But the race was closer than those numbers suggest. Harris lost the three key “Blue Wall” states by a total of roughly 230,000 votes. If she had beat the margins of 1.44 percent in Michigan, 1.73 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.87 percent in Wisconsin, she would be president today.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“In an interview toward the end of Biden’s presidency, one senior official acknowledged the reality: They could pull down the schedule and put up a press conference and ten interviews, but “I don’t know they would have gone well.” And that was the whole of it. He couldn’t do what folks were calling on him to do to prove his acuity.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again