Biden, King of the Forest

The Russian word “Politburo” has become firmly established in the modern political language of the United States. And we have Joe Robinette Biden, the 46th president of the country, to thank for this.

The recently published and already bestselling book “Original Sin: The Decline of President Biden, His Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Decision to Run Again” by Jake Tapper (a journalist for CNN) and Alex Thompson (a journalist for Axios) tells how a secret group of aides ran the White House from behind the scenes to hide the deteriorating mental health of President Joe Biden.

The tight-knit group that ran the country on behalf of a president who was poorly oriented in reality was referred to behind the scenes in the White House as the “Politburo” (the authors explain that this term refers to “an elite inner circle of a communist regime that wields unchecked power”).

According to Thompson, this informal body included longtime Biden aides such as Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, and Ron Klain, as well as key figures who were members of or close to the Biden family, such as First Lady Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, Jill Biden’s chief of staff Anthony Bernal, and Annie Tomasini, who often served as Biden’s “traveling” chief of staff.

Notably absent from this list are several individuals who were rightly considered decision makers in US foreign and domestic policy under the previous administration: former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. It turns out — to continue the parallels with the Soviet system — that they were, at best, “members of the Central Committee.”

But perhaps most interesting is the interview that the now-star Alex Thompson gave to Fox News host Shannon Bream. Thompson said Biden’s inner circle was willing to take “undemocratic” measures to cover up the former president’s deplorable state of mind as they desperately cling to power for another four years while blocking President Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House.

If you believe — and I think many of these people genuinely believe — that Donald Trump was and remains an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize away anything, including occasionally doing undemocratic things, Thompson said.

At the recent annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Thompson gave a powerful speech about the media’s responsibility for perpetuating the myth of an energetic and sane president. “President Biden’s decline and the cover-up by those around him is a reminder that any White House administration, regardless of party affiliation, is capable of deception,” he said.

But it’s a rather feeble attempt to deflect the blow from the real culprits of a scandal that will rock the U.S. political system for a long time to come.

Tapper and Thompson’s book suggests that Biden’s decline was not sudden. During a grueling eight-day bus tour of Iowa in December 2019, Biden forgot the name of his longtime aide Mike Donilon. Donilon had worked with Biden for nearly 40 years. “It was time to worry,” the authors write. But the Democratic establishment was betting too much on a candidate who had a chance to defeat the hated Trump.

And this is not because Biden has some cognitive problems, which were evident at least in 2019. Apparently, he went into the 2020 election already aware of a diagnosis that became public knowledge only a week ago.

(To be continued)