Thread by @Tyler_A_Harper

I wrote about Biden and the new book. As the reporting in "Original Sin" makes clear: this story is bigger than just the 2024 campaign. It was more than a year or two of decline. We need to confront the truth: Joe Biden never should have been president of the United States. 🧵

https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1923381726409113776

So far, most discussion of the book has focused on incidents from later in Biden’s term and 2024 campaign: not recognizing Clooney, calling Sullivan “Steve.” But arguably the most damning new reveal came much earlier, during the 2020 campaign, when Biden was not yet president. 2/

The authors report that in 2020, Biden's staffers tried to get videos of him speaking with voters about key issues on Zoom for campaign content. But “he couldn’t follow the conversation at all.” A special team was tasked with editing *hours of footage* into usable *minutes*. 3/

At least two Democrats who helped produce the films were shocked. They concluded, before Biden ever put his hand on the Bible or sat behind the Resolute Desk, that he wasn’t up to the job. “I didn’t think he could be president,” one of these Democrats explained. In 2020. 4/

People close to Biden tell the authors that his deterioration first became noticeable in 2015. Tapper and Thompson point to tapes from 2017 that suggest “Biden was really struggling” and “his cognitive capacity seemed to have been failing him.” By 2020, it was getting worse. 5/

Beyond the Zoom disaster, during Biden’s 2020 campaign aides said that “they couldn’t rely on him to stay on message, and he often had a very short attention span.” In at least one case, they resorted to a teleprompter with scripted questions for an interview. Again: in 2020. 6/

The book goes on to catalogue many disturbing incidents during Biden’s four years. Yes it got worse in 2023/2024, but it was bad from the beginning: cabinet meetings were described as “terrible and at times uncomfortable” from the onset. Biden used notecards. Canned responses. 7/

The picture the authors paint is of a president who was unable to adequately discharge the duties of his office from the very beginning of his term and certainly was unfit by the end of it: by 2024 cabinet secretaries confessed he couldn’t be relied on in an emergency. 8/

Moments throughout the book are stunning, but only one made me gasp. It was not something Biden did, but that one of his aides said about his 2024 run: “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.” 9/

In other words, the 2024 plan—for this aide at least—was to try to get a mentally unfit president elected for four more years, and then to hide him from the public while unelected staff ran the country. That’s an attempt to undermine democracy and defraud the American public. 10/

As for the DNC, they not only failed to stop this train wreck but greased the tracks: they nixed a century-old primary schedule to put SC first, a strong state for Biden, under the false pretense of “uplifting Black voters.” All to reelect a man the public thought was unfit. 11/

There’s more in my article, much more in the book, but if you find yourself dismissing this because Trump is worse, or downplaying it as “just an old man being old” or “just some bad days,” I do think you should ask yourself: is that really where you want to lower the bar to? 12/

It is not acceptable for a man who has some good days and some bad days to control the nuclear codes. It’s not acceptable for a man who runs US foreign policy to have memory lapses or need teleprompter for basic questions or only be able to work reliably from 10am to 4pm. 13/

If you’re defending Biden against these revelations or downplaying them, you’ve lost the plot. In a sane world, there’d be bipartisan hearings. Regardless, the American public needs to confront the deeper implication: we’ve not had a fit, functional president in nearly a decade.