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If you pay any attention at all to political news, it's been hard to avoid Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's recent bombshell of a book, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which offers behind-the-scenes reporting from the White House, halls of Congress, the campaign trail, and beyond about Joe Biden's health, mental and physical, and the efforts to conceal just how bad it had gotten from his Cabinet, Congress, and, most damningly, the American people. Much of the coverage of the book has focused on a handful of sensational examples—Biden supposedly not recognizing George Clooney at a fundraiser, or forgetting the names of staffers who'd worked for him for decades—but that's unfortunate. What's most shocking is the book's cumulative force, the sheer number of details that make it undoubtedly clear Biden was not fit to run again in 2024, or, for that matter, be President. As you won't be surprised to learn, Matt eagerly read Original Sin, and he and Sam discuss what the take-aways from the book should really be, what it says about the state of the Democratic Party, what it reveals about the media, and more.

Jake Tapper & Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again (2025)

Matthew Sitman, "The 'Weekend at Bernie's' Primary," Commonweal, Mar 3, 2020

Sam Adler-Bell, "The Tragic Legacy of the Mourner-in-Chief," New York Magazine, Jan 14, 2025

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s & 70s (2009)

— My Lives: A Memoir (2005)

— A Boy's Own Story (1982)

— The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988)

— The Farewell Symphony (1997)

— Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)