As more information is revealed about Joe Biden’s decline in the forthcoming Tapper/Thompson book “Original Sin,” the narrative being pushed by the mainstream press is that the signs weren’t really noticeable by those close to him until 2022-2023.
It’s something that was strongly implied well before any books came out on the subject, with former NBC News “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd saying a couple of weeks after the infamous June 2024 debate that he’d had a conversation with a senior cabinet secretary “two years ago” about Biden’s cognitive health.
“This is one of those, you know, it’s the classic open secret, nonversation, right? It’s the story everybody knows and everybody was afraid to talk about,” Todd talked about at the time after noting it was the unnamed cabinet secretary who initiated the conversation.
The problem with the 2022-2023 spin is that Biden was openly showing signs of decline well before that, with even some of his Democrat primary opponents openly making it an issue in the 2020 campaign.
As it turns out, there were figures within his 2020 campaign circle whose concerns steadily grew about his fitness to lead as time went on, something else that was revealed in the book, as recalled by Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper in a Twitter/X thread: