Review of Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes (HarperCollins, 2025) and Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson (Penguin, 2025)
There is no other rational response to the cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline and infirmity than anger.
If you’re an American, it should make you angry that the many people who knew better stayed silent about, even actively conspired to hide, the fact that Biden wasn’t actually capable of executing his responsibilities as president, handing untold amounts of power to a cabal of advisors you never voted for.
And if you’re a Democratic voter, it should make you angry that a party that spent years promising they would, at very least, stop Donald Trump (and maybe not do much more), and that their blocking his reelection justified asking for your money and demanding your votes, ended up putting Trump in the White House again, in large part by installing and then keeping in power a man they knew was unfit for office.
Questions about Biden’s ill health, and who knew what about it and when, have been reignited in recent weeks, thanks to the release of two complementary books that have added new, scandalous details to the already scandalous litany of details about Biden’s condition that erupted after his disturbing June 2024 debate performance. One is Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Fight, the third in a trilogy of Trump-era behind-the-scenes campaign accounts by the pair that dropped last month; the other, which has been dominating political coverage the past couple of weeks, is Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper’s Original Sin, an…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
