Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. Penguin Press. 348 pages. 2025. Audiobook read by Jake Tapper
***
This book was written by Jake Tapper, of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios. The two interviewed 200 people, including members of Congress, White House staffers and campaign insiders, primarily after the 2024 presidential election.
The book claims that Biden’s inner circle helped to conceal his declining physical and cognitive health as he and his aides insisted he was fit to serve a second term. The Democratic Party failed to question that decision until after Biden’s disastrous June 27, 2024 debate with Donald Trump, and by then, it was too late.
The authors write that their only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023-2024. They tell the story pretty much chronologically.

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From the time I heard that Tapper was writing the book, I thought how hypocritical it was. Tapper, on CNN, is a part of the liberal media, and he did not report on Biden’s mental decline until after the debate, when others started calling for him to withdraw as the Democratic nominee. You will find little or no accountability for Tapper or the press in general, for the cover-up in the book.
By the start of the presidential campaign of 2024 most Americans, had decided that Joe Biden was not fit to run again. After all, Biden had said that he would be his presidency would be a transitional candidate, that he be a bridge to younger leaders, and only serve one term. But Biden and his inner circle contended that he was the only one who could beat Trump, and thus he would run for re-election in 2024. What we find out about in this book are the extent Biden’s inner circle would go to stay in power and defeat Trump.
Those who follow politics will not be surprised by most of what is revealed in this book. What the book does offer are specific details, though not many of their sources were willing to go on the record.
Here are some of the interesting things that the book reveals:

• Biden failed to recognize longtime political allies, or supporters (such as actor George Clooney), would lose his train of thought in important conversations and forgot important dates, including when he was Vice President and the death of his son Beau.
• Efforts to record campaign videos were disastrous. Biden couldn’t make it through two minutes of a recorded video without messing it up.
• The President was often unable to function other than around lunchtime.
• There were talks, after a fall, of a wheelchair for his second term, but not until he was re-elected.
• A longtime Biden aide says “He just had to win and then he could disappear for four years. He’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”
• The authors indicate their belief that Hunter Biden’s legal troubles were inflection points that triggered further decline for Biden.
• Biden’s aides scripted much of the internal meetings even when there was no media attending them, and multiple Cabinet secretaries stated that aides limited access to the president.
• Former Obama White House chief of staff Bill Daley tried to convince governors to primary Biden, but none were willing to.
• Tapper and Thompson report that “no Democrats in the White House or leaders on Capitol Hill raised any doubts, either privately with the President or publicly, about Biden’s second run” in the aftermath of the 2022 midterms. For the longest time, until after the debate, no Democrats publicly wanted to call him to step down as the nominee.
• The shock of those who would see a frail Biden after not seeing him for a few years.
• The “villains” of this book are Mike Donilon, his closest aide, legislative affairs chief Steve Richetti, First Lady Jill Biden, and personal aides Annie Tomasini (to the president) and Anthony Bernal (to the First Lady).
• Biden’s insiders were a group, dubbed by the authors (and some junior aides) as the Politburo. They were a group of five people running the country, with Biden being a senior member of the board at best. This was a deception to the country and to the more than 81 million people who voted for him in 2020.
• Biden’s inner circle would hide polling data from him that said he couldn’t win re-election.

Near the end of the book the authors refer to Watergate. They state that Joe Biden is not Richard Nixon and this scandal is not Watergate. I contend that the scandal and coverup of the ability for Joe Biden to lead is actually worse than Watergate.

We come away wondering how Biden’s decline and inability to effectively lead could have been covered up with so many 24-hour news networks covering the President’s every move and word. Will anyone be held accountable for this coverup?

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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown and Company. 368 pages. 2000
*** ½

I recently decided to go back and revisit Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference before reading the follow-up Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering.
Gladwell tells us that three characteristics – one, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment – are the same three principles that define how measles moves through a grade-school classroom or the flu attacks every winter. The third trait – the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment – is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. He writes that the name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is the Tipping Point. It is the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point. He tells us that the world of the Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is, contrary to all our expectations, a certainty.
In this book, Gladwell introduces us to several new terms, such as:

• The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable.
• The Power of Context says that human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem.
• The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.

Gladwell tells us that the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

Gladwell also introduces us to these three key players:

• Connectors. They are a handful of people with a truly extraordinary knack of making friends and acquaintances.
• Mavens. They accumulate knowledge. They have the knowledge and the social skills to start word-of-mouth epidemics.
• Salesman. They have the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.

In this book, Gladwell takes these ideas, and applies them to them to other puzzling situations and epidemics from the world around us, that include Hush Puppies, Paul Revere’s ride, Sesame Street, Blue’s Clues, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, John Wesley, suicide on the islands of Micronesia, and teenage smoking.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book are:

• The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
• Little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things.
• That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
• This is where, I think, Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen play their most important role. They are the ones who make it possible for innovations to overcome this problem of the chasm. They are translators: they take ideas and information from a highly specialized world and translate them into a language the rest of us can understand.
• What Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning.
• If anyone wants to start an epidemic, he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way: he or she has to find some person or some means to translate the message of the Innovators into something the rest of us can understand.
• Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.
• When people are overwhelmed with information and develop immunity to traditional forms of communication, they turn instead for advice and information to the people in their lives whom they respect, admire, and trust.
• The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle contextual factors that can make a big difference.

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• Study, Savor and Share Scripture: Becoming What We Behold. My wife Tammy has published a book about HOW to study the Bible. The book is available on Amazon in both a Kindle and paperback edition. She writes “Maybe you have read the Bible but want to dig deeper and know God and know yourself better. Throughout the book I use the analogy of making a quilt to show how the Bible is telling one big story about what God is doing in the world through Christ. Quilting takes much patience and precision, just like studying the Bible, but the end result is well worth it.”
• Book Review: The Elder-Led Church. Scott Daniel reviews The Elder-Led Church by Murray Capill. He writes “The Elder-Led Churchis a useful addition to the topic of local church leadership.”

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Won’t you read along with us?

We are reading through Truths We Confess: A Systematic Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith by R.C. Sproul. From the Ligonier description:

“The Westminster Confession of Faith is one of the most precise and comprehensive statements of biblical Christianity, and it is treasured by believers around the world. R.C. Sproul has called it one of the most important confessions of faith ever penned, and it has helped generations of Christians understand and defend what they believe.

In Truths We Confess, Dr. Sproul introduces readers to this remarkable confession, explaining its insights and applying them to modern life. In his signature easy-to-understand style and with his conviction that everyone’s a theologian, he provides valuable commentary that will serve churches and individual Christians as they strive to better understand the eternal truths of Scripture. As he walks through the confession line by line, Dr. Sproul shows how the doctrines of the Bible—from creation to covenant, sin to salvation—fit together to the glory of God. This accessible volume is designed to help you deepen your knowledge of God’s Word and answer the question, What do you believe?”

This week we look at the first half of WCF 27: Of the Sacraments. Here are a few helpful quotes from this section of the chapter:

• There are controversies about the number of the sacraments, their meaning, origin, mode, and efficacy, as well as who may dispense and who may receive them.
• The Lord’s Supper communicates the significance of the Lord’s death nonverbally.
• Sacraments are given in the context of covenant. The sign of the old covenant was circumcision, and the sign of the new covenant is baptism.
• In the Old Testament, the sign of participation in the covenant of grace was circumcision.
• People ask: “Does baptism automatically, supernaturally regenerate a person? Does baptism save us?” The Reformation answer is no.
• The integrity of that sign does not rest with the person who gives it, or the person who receives it, or the parents who were there. The integrity of the sign rests with the One whose promise it is.
• Both baptism and the Lord’s Supper are outward signs and outward seals of the truth of God’s promises.
• The Lord’s Supper ought never to be celebrated without preaching, because the signs are never to be given without the Word. The Word and the sacrament may be distinguished but not separated.
• The sacrament is not just an empty ritual. It has spiritual significance and reality because God assigns that to it.
• The grace that is exhibited by the sacraments is not conferred by any power in them.
• The efficacy of a sacrament depends not on the piety or intention of the minister but on the actual working of the Spirit and on the One who instituted the sacraments.
• The sacraments are Trinitarian. The Father gives authority to His Son, the Son institutes them, and the Holy Spirit applies or empowers them.

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