If you haven’t read the new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, “Original Sin,” you should. The book details how former President Biden’s top aides, advisers and media contacts lied to the American people about the president’s fitness for office and his suitability as a candidate, and argues that this series of cover-ups is ultimately responsible for President Trump’s 2024 victory.
If its revelations are even half true (and there is every reason to believe they are truer than that), this book should chill and sober Democrats, independents and anyone else who would prefer an alternative to Trump’s GOP.
“Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” raises one profound question with implications that extend far beyond 2024 or even 2028: Why did top Democrats think that they not only could but should shoehorn a sadly diminished and dangerously unfit Biden into a second presidential term?
Here’s one answer: Democrats’ perception of their own virtue has somehow become inextricable from their unwillingness to acknowledge reality as it actually is, rather than as they would like it to be.
It would have been quite convenient if Biden circa 2024 was in fact indistinguishable from Biden circa 2016 or even 2020. The fact that this was obviously not the case did not deter Democrats’ insistence on it as not just true but unquestionable. The depth of this problem for the party cannot be overstated.
The definitional tic of today’s Democrats is a belligerent unwillingness (which ultimately seems to beget a helpless inability) to acknowledge any truth that they find inconvenient or troubling.
Here’s what I’m talking about: Many Democrats will still maintain that Michael Brown had his hands up when Darren Wilson shot him. They will still argue that coronavirus could not have come from a lab in China, and they will maintain that it fully warranted the closing of schools. They hold fast to the idea that traditional masculinity and “cisgender” normativity are social constructs that can ultimately be eradicated via progressive social programming. They will not abandon the notion that biologically male transgender athletes may fairly compete as female athletes.
Many influential Democrats remain unwilling or unable to acknowledge that each of these statements has been proven demonstrably false. The sad irony, of course, is that elite Democrats’ insistence on collective delusion with respect to such matters leads, inevitably, exactly where their lies about Biden did: to reactionary backlash.
Because they did not insist on a timely, competitive primary to replace Biden, the U.S is stuck with Trump.
Because they did not correct the lies and check the excesses of Black Lives Matter and its apologists in K-12 and higher education, we are left with decreased public safety and increased racial tensions.
Because they did not ask the correct questions about COVID but parroted the mantra “trust the science” in response to answers from those who did, we are left with an academic achievement gap that will disproportionately affect low-income, non-white students for the rest of their lives.
Because they did not concede the biological facts of dimorphic sex and of characterological and psychological differences between most men and most women, we are left with decreasing societal acceptance for homosexual Americans and misogynistic attempts to regressively erase intragroup variance among women.
I know that many of my fellow Democrats are primed to reply: “But that’s not fair! They are the ones who elected Trump, and who are harboring these racists and misogynists, and you blame us?”
Well, yes. Here’s why: By denying realities they find unsavory, Democrats leave any legitimate claim of truth to Republicans. And MAGA embraces that truth — with a literal vengeance.
The Republicans’ manner of denying reality is to wildly overstate it. So, for today’s manosphere, for example, women are not just different from men on average, but so entirely unlike men that they should all, when possible, reflexively eschew any professional ambition in favor of “tradwifery.”
If Democrats did not deny fundamental truths altogether, fewer people would accept Republicans’ bastardizations of them.
Can Tapper and Thompson’s book be positioned as one that uses Biden as a case study to help Democrats see that we gain nothing by denying reality, and behave accordingly? I hope so. Because the truth will out. And it would be really good for the country if that most fundamental reality of all did not so overwhelmingly favor today’s patently cruel and often incompetent Republican Party.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is based in Philadelphia. She writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.
