Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Alex Thompson
Produced by Finbar Anderson
Listen to and follow The Lede
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Podbean
“I think reporters forgot the cardinal rule, which is that every White House lies,” journalist Alex Thompson tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede. Alongside his co-author, CNN anchor Jake Tapper, the veteran White House reporter for Axios recently published “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and his Disastrous Choice To Run Again,” an explosive expose of the inner workings of Joe Biden’s White House at a crucial moment in the run up to the 2024 election.
“I remember talking to reporters, they’re like, ‘The White House senior advisers are telling me that this is not true,’” Thompson says. “I was like, ‘Well, they’re lying to you.’”
“I remember talking to reporters who said, ‘The White House senior advisers are telling me that this is not true.’ And I was like, ‘Well, they’re lying to you.’”
“There are two stories here,” Thompson elaborates. “One is that the Democratic Party was clearly not listening to their voters, who were speaking incredibly clearly that this guy cannot do the job until January of 2029. That being said, the extent of [Biden’s] decline was also being hidden through very careful management of Joe Biden’s schedule, through shielding him from the public.”
For some time, Thompson says, the actions of Biden’s staff were perfectly understandable given the context of Biden’s advanced years. “Why we use the term cover-up is because by late 2023, they begin basically shielding him from many other members of the staff. So stuff that could be innocent was no longer as innocent.”
Al Yafai queries whether Biden’s declining health might have impacted his ability to deal with complex foreign policy issues, including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. The Biden team’s official line was that Biden’s decision-making was unchanged throughout the time period in question — a suggestion Thompson rejects strongly. “If the guy can no longer speak the way that he used to even three years ago, how do you know that his decision-making was not impacted,” he asks. “If all these other things are declining, and you’re just insisting that his decision-making ability is not declining at all, I just find that rationale to not be honest.”