It was as bad as you feared.
Joe Biden couldn’t remember the name of Jake Sullivan, his top national security aide. He stared at people he had known for decades, including George Clooney, like he’d never seen them before. His top advisers hid him from his own staff. Cabinet members realized that the president could not be relied upon to respond to an emergency that came at an inconvenient hour.
Original Sin, the new book by CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson, is all Washington can talk about right now. Although its official release isn’t until Tuesday, there have been enough previews and excerpts for everyone to know what it says: that the decision by Biden’s top aides to keep his cognitive decline a secret was an enormous scandal. Perhaps even the biggest political scandal of the 21st century.