‘I’ve never seen a situation like this before, with so few people having so much power’
Recent books about the 2024 election, including the just-published Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, have made clear what was obvious to most Americans with eyes and ears: Joe Biden was not fit to serve as president another four, and was more than likely unfit to serve the previous four. They have also provided a clearer picture of who was actually running the country this whole time. This cadre of Biden loyalists yielded tremendous power when their “boss” was “president,” and did everything they could to stay in charge.
Thompson told the New Yorker that some less influential Biden aides believed there would have been a “constitutional crisis” if Biden won a second term because “clearly the people in his inner circle were not willing to cede power.” They didn’t care that Biden was a walking corpse, they just wanted to get him across the finish line. “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,” said one longtime Biden aide who was eager to continue running the country while Biden wasted away in hospice care. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too.”
Remember their names and faces. They deserve nothing less than a legacy of shame.
Mike Donilon
An adviser to Biden since 1981, Donilon was a leading member of what aides called “The Politburo,” the inner circle of longtime Biden aides whose loyalty to the family “was a theology that bordered on zealotry.” Biden would do whatever he asked. “The president valued Mike Donilon’s advice so much that aides would later joke that if he wanted, he could get Biden to start a war,” Tapper and Thompson write in Original Sin. Donilon aggressively shot down suggestions that Biden’s aides should have a conversation about whether running for reelection was a good idea. It’s not hard to see why. After earning a fortune on the 2020 campaign, thanks to an unusual uncapped commission on paid ads that some viewed as financial “malpractice,” Donilon refused to accept less than $4 million to advise the 2024 campaign. Biden approved the outrageous salary, infuriating senior staffers who complained that the next highest-paid employee, female campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, was earning just $300,000.
Donilon really wanted to keep running the country, which is presumably why he was quite to “shut down” aides who even suggesting having a conversation about whether Biden should consider quitting after one term. He refused to convey to Biden the dire warnings from campaign pollsters in the days and weeks following the disastrous debate on CNN, which he didn’t think was a big deal. He berated Democratic officials who called on Biden to step aside, and (to his credit) reminded them that the only viable alternative, Kamala Harris, was incompetent. He wanted to take it all the way to the convention and force a nasty Democratic civil war, which would have been fun to watch but is also insane. He was desperate not to lose the perks of power.
“Nobody walks away from this,” Donilon said. “No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.” Donilon, whose niece got a job at the National Security Council, still believes, or claims to believe, that Biden is mentally sharp and would have won reelection if the Democratic Party hadn’t “melted down” after his disastrous debate. At a Harvard event earlier this year, he dismissed claims of Biden’s cognitive decline as a false “impression” created by the media. Tapper and Thompson report that Biden had “struggled to remember” Donilon’s name on the campaign trail back in 2019. That was around the time some aides began to notice some decline, but were to scared to express their concerns. “[T]here was no way to have that conversation with him or his most senior aides,” the author write. “It was almost taboo.”
Jill Biden / Anthony Bernal / Annie Tomasini
It’s evident by now that Dr. Jill Biden played a central role in the cover-up. She also played a central role in the White House and on both presidential campaigns. She was “picking up the slack” while refusing to acknowledge her husband’s decline, leading cabinet meetings, and so on. Tapper and Thompson recount how in December 2022, the first lady was boasting about her “rigorous exercise routine” to French president Emmanuel Macron, and explained that “campaigns are tough and she needed to be in shape.” Nancy Pelosi’s daughter overheard, and asked the president if it was true that he was running again. “He looked back at her like he didn’t understand,” the authors write. Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, described Jill’s motivation in 2024: “She likes power. She wants to stay. She wants some sense of revenge.”
Jill Biden’s chief of staff, Anthony Bernal, was her loyal hatchet man who was vigorously loathed by everyone he met except the Bidens.
Steve Ricchetti
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Discussing the insanity of the situation with a House Democrat, Aguilar remarked that “folks like Ricchetti and Donilon—they’re living the first line of their obituaries right now. People don’t give that up.”
Steve Ricchetti, his legislative affairs expert;
Bruce Reed
Biden’s domestic policy adviser
Ron Klain
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Anita Dunn / Bob Bauer
Outside the Politburo but in that next concentric circle were Dunn, an expert in communications, and Bauer, a respected lawyer, who had both worked for the most powerful Democrats in Washington. They didn’t have the almost familial ties that Donilon, Ricchetti, and Reed did, but Dunn and Bauer had more credibility with the Democratic establishment, including Obama.
Antony Blinken / Jake Sullivan
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Hunter Biden
“Hunter was driving the decision-making for the family,” Tapper said this week while promoting his book. “He was almost like a chief of staff.”
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