Democrats and Journalists Still Avoid Biden's Decline!

Tim Graham on May 16, 2025

The first excerpts of the Jake Tapper-Alex Thompson book on denying former President Joe Biden's obvious mental decline have been posted, and you can already sense Democrats don't want to deal with what they have done.

The book's title is "Original Sin." Why the biblical title? The authors write: "The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden's decision to run for re-election -- followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment."

There is more religious terminology. "It was an abomination," one "prominent Democratic strategist" told the authors. "He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people."

The condemnations here make sense, but they are far too narrow. Democrats as a whole failed to hold an actual primary election in 2024. Almost no one decided to challenge Biden, with the unforgettable exception of Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who ran explicitly on the issue of Biden's inability to run for reelection and serve a second term.

Democrat state parties kept challengers like Phillips off primary ballots, and Democrats sought to strip Donald Trump off primary ballots. So the "stole an election" sermon ignores a lot of facts.

The condemnation should obviously include the Democrat-allied media, who mostly ignored Phillips and his cause or told him he was foolish. They still don't want to talk about this.

Since the first previews in The New Yorker and Axios, where we learned Biden didn't recognize actor George Clooney at a fundraiser and Biden aides pondered putting him in a wheelchair after the election, only NBC offered a short report summarizing the scoops. ABC, CBS and PBS ignored it.

The "PBS News Hour" offered nine grieving minutes on a state law in Ohio gutting DEI programs on campus, but nothing on Biden. These networks might still sound like NPR as it dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop in 2020. It's a "pure distraction."

The broadcast networks have displayed their shamelessly partisan reflexes, that on any issue that feels like a Trump talking point, they circle their wagons around Democrat die-hards.

The "sin" here extends to these authors. If and when Tapper and Thompson engage with the national media in interviews, let's guess there won't be much pushback on their own demurrals and dismissals of Biden's decline during his four years in office. Like many journalists, they'll insist they didn't avoid the issue -- but that's only because the voters told pollsters it was a problem.

For his part, Tapper didn't cover Biden trying to find a dead congresswoman in the audience in 2022, and he swiped at Republicans like presidential contender Nikki Haley insisting on cognitive tests for elderly candidates. He attacked Republican critics after Biden's yelling-Grandpa performance at the 2024 State of the Union address.

Tapper didn't want to be on the "wrong" side of the Bidens. Dylan Byers at Puck reported that at a Super Bowl party in 2018, Hunter Biden put his arm around Tapper and told him if they weren't in public, "I would knock you out." Hunter believed Tapper had reported on allegations of his rampant use of drugs and prostitutes that emerged from his divorce. Tapper assured Hunter that he didn't report any of that -- as if that's a point of pride.

Democrats and their media allies need to face a reckoning for their vast left-wing conspiracy to deny what everyone could see -- that Biden was unfit to continue, even to the end of his term. This is especially ridiculous for networks like Tapper's CNN, which repeatedly proclaimed that President Trump was mentally unfit throughout his first term, pushing a 25th Amendment "solution" for him.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.