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The Gospel According to Whispers: How Original Sin Became Scripture for Media Reckoning [1]
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Date: 2025-05-26
On anonymous sources, aging presidents, and the media’s eternal craving for redemption from Damnation
Yes, the recent book Original Sin introduces new reporting that escalates concerns about President Biden’s mental and physical decline to near-scandalous levels. But that’s precisely the problem. Much of the content is based on anonymous sources. This approach might hold in journalism but fails the standard of evidence required in history and political science, where claims must be transparent and verifiable. Instead of offering clarity, the book ends up echoing a long-standing, distorted narrative promoted by right-wing media: that Biden is a hollowed-out figure, mentally absent and manipulated by shadowy figures. At that point, it veers into propaganda—not journalism.
What makes the revisionism in Original Sin so maddening is its selective targeting. While it maligns Biden with shadowy anecdotes, it lets Donald Trump—a man known for deranged rants, wild conspiracy theories, two impeachments, a felony conviction, and a sexual assault judgment—off the hook. None of this is to deny that Biden is aging. He is. By the end of his term, it was clear to those around him—and many voters—that he no longer had the same energy. He didn’t have his fastball anymore. But there’s a world of difference between a president showing the wear of his 80s and a man secretly suffering from advanced dementia. Conflating the two, as Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity, and Fox News have done for years, wasn’t just misleading—it was malicious.
From the early days of the 2020 campaign, MAGA media figures floated increasingly absurd claims about Biden’s mental fitness. They painted him as a senile figurehead, unaware of his surroundings and propped up by Barack Obama or Ron Klain or some liberal cabal. Now, in Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson have simply substituted new names—Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Bruce Reed, Jill Biden, and Hunter Biden, the right’s favorite bogeyman—without offering verifiable facts. This isn’t reporting; it’s throwing spaghetti at the wall and pretending it’s analysis. And sadly, in many corners of the country, it has stuck.
Tapper has since made his own rhetorical pivot. In a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, he declared, “conservative media was right and conservative media was correct.” His book, devoid of rigorous sourcing, now feeds the right-wing narrative demanding apologies from journalists who didn’t promote the dementia storyline fast enough. Once again, the refrain is: “We were right all along.”
On a recent Wednesday episode of Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough treated viewers to a tale of political whiplash. After reminiscing fondly about all the quality time he had spent talking, lunching, and gallivanting around Ireland with President Biden, he somehow arrived at the conclusion that—surprise!—the so-called "Biden cover-up" was actually real. Apparently, his own eyes had lied to him. Scarborough joined the choir of self-correction, renouncing his previous convictions like a man waking from a dream.
Enter Jake Tapper, stage left, to explain it all away. According to Tapper, Scarborough hadn’t been mistaken—he’d been played. Yes, the president’s team, using the cunning weapon of folksy charm and anecdotal storytelling, had successfully duped one of cable news’s most seasoned political journalists. And all of this, mind you, was orchestrated by a man allegedly suffering from a serious neurodegenerative disorder. That’s right—while Biden was supposedly mentally incapacitated, he was also running a psychological operation so smooth it left seasoned pundits hoodwinked. This isn’t just a narrative—it’s a Netflix series waiting to happen. What a curious little web we’ve woven.
But Biden’s behavior, while slower and more deliberate with age, has always been consistent with who he’s long been. Alisyn Camerota pushed back on the idea of a media cover-up, saying any so-called cover-up was “hiding in plain sight.” She recalled how she and Victor Blackwell would air Biden’s speeches live, joking about their predictability: the stammer, the word-search, the tangent, the familiar story. It wasn’t new. It was vintage Biden—older, yes—but the same gaffe-prone politician people had known for decades.
Even in the 2008 primary, when asked if he could keep his answers short, Biden quipped with one word: “Yes.” The room laughed. He was self-aware, if verbose. Likewise, both he and Barack Obama were criticized for relying on teleprompters, even in small settings—criticism that MAGA media weaponized as a sign of manipulation or incompetence. But for Biden, the teleprompter was more about containment than concealment—to limit verbosity and stay on message.
Back on Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski and Scarborough tried to nudge Tapper into acknowledging the administration’s many successes. Tapper, suddenly stricken with acute memory loss, squirmed like someone realizing too late that the hot mic is still on. Tapper sidestepped the question. His posture said what his words did not—hesitancy, discomfort, refusal to validate what had, in fact, been a legislatively and diplomatically productive presidency. Apparently, infrastructure bills and economic stabilization don’t rate as highly as “he looked tired on Thursday.”
Biden aged. That much is clear. People don’t get younger. But the man was not an empty shell. His presidency was not perfect, but he governed. He made decisions. He passed legislation. He acted—while under relentless attack from a media machine that abandoned its role as watchdog and embraced the role of attack dog.
The authors of Original Sin also appear eager to drag Kamala Harris into the so-called cover-up. The book insinuates that she is now co-conspirator-in-chief because she did not blow the whistle on Biden’s alleged decline. And so, she too is smeared. CNN’s Michael Smerconish pressed co-author Alex Thompson on a viral excerpt alleging Harris called Anderson Cooper a “motherfucker” after a tense interview in which he grilled her repeatedly on Biden’s health. If she said it—so what? It was a private conversation. She had a right to be upset over an interview she perceived as unfair. She answered his question; he didn’t like the answer. And let’s be honest: that likely wasn’t the first time Anderson Cooper was called that word—but it may have been the first time by a Black woman. Besides, if what I understand about his personal preferences is correct, “motherfucker” might not even be the most accurate descriptor. Maybe Thompson’s source got it wrong. But do we even know who the source is?
In American history, the original sin of America is identified as African slavery, because it was a fundamental, pervasive, and morally reprehensible practice that profoundly shaped the nation's history, economics, and culture. Its enduring legacy—racism—continues to shape our political reality. This legacy underlies why Kamala Harris could not ascend to the presidency. Until political strategists and pundits develop a message capable of confronting and mitigating both racism and misogyny, the nation will remain trapped in a white supremacist, patriarchal circle of hell—one that, in our time, has become synonymous with Trumpism and not a damning portrait of an enfeebled Biden protected by his inner circle.
Then there are the anonymous whispers included in the book that feed into familiar tropes about Black people, and Black women in particular. Harris is described as lazy and a “bitch,” with claims that she “didn’t put in the work and was also just not a very nice person.” These characterizations don’t offer insight—they offer bias. And some whispers went further, quietly expressing buyer’s remorse: suggesting they should have picked the white woman, Gretchen Whitmer. The implication isn’t subtle—and it’s not new.
Let’s shift gears. America’s actual original sin wasn’t stammering. The long arc of America’s original sins is colonial violence, slavery, exploitation of labor, and the persistent grip of greed masquerading as governance. Yet Original Sin ignores this historical trifecta, opting to catastrophize one aging man's public speaking style. That’s exactly why Original Sin, the book—not the moral indictment—feels so hollow. It attempts to cloak itself in the gravity of historical reckoning--democracy’s imminent collapse. Yet, they sidestep white supremacy, misogyny, and plutocracy like it's wet cement. It failed to address the systemic forces. Instead, the damnation was laid on Biden’s “decision to run for re-election — followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” It sensationalized anecdotes, anonymous whispers, and a narrative more interested in feeding clickbait hysteria than confronting the real legacies of power and oppression. Why confront generational injustice when you can dissect syllables?
In that sense, the book is less a reckoning than a distraction—focused on dramatizing one man’s age while glossing over the structures that have harmed many for centuries. If we’re serious about understanding how we got to "the hell of Trump," we will do better not to listen to media-driven echo chambers hiding behind unnamed sources but to voices grounded in lived experience and historical memory.
This long view underscores the irony: while Original Sin tries to sound the alarm about democracy's fragility, it avoids naming the enduring forces that have always threatened it—white supremacy, patriarchal dominance, and corporate greed. It’s easier to gossip about Biden’s gaffes than to grapple with the institutional rot that enabled Trumpism in the first place.
So here I stand—like many others—grounded not in innuendo but in evidence. I don’t know how much of this book was desperate rationalization versus performative scheming. But I know this: If I change my mind, it won’t be because of shadowy “sources familiar with the president’s vibe.” It’ll take facts. Real ones. The kind you can cite without squinting—because much of the book’s content relies on anonymous sources. That approach might fly in journalism, where the scoop matters more than the citation. But in history and political science, it fails the smell test. In these disciplines, credibility demands transparency. If your thesis is that the president of the United States was mentally unfit and everyone around him conspired to hide it, you’d better bring more than whispers and winks. You need evidence—verifiable, attributable, and solid. Otherwise, you're just throwing smoke bombs into the historical record.
And until then, I’ll keep watching this media circus—with popcorn in one hand, and a B.S. detector in the other.
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