PRESIDENT BIDEN’S DECLINE, ITS COVER-UP, AND HIS DISASTROUS CHOICE TO RUN AGAIN
Original Sin
Also by
Jake Tapper
All the Demons Are Here
The Devil May Dance
The Hellfire Club
The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency
Body Slam: The Jesse Ventura Story
President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN
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To Jennifer, Alice, and Jack
You are my everything.
— Jake
To Mom and Dad
Thanks for putting up with me.
— Alex
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
— “Ulysses,” Alfred Lord Tennyson
They told me I was everything; ’tis a lie, I am not ague-proof.
— King Lear , William Shakespeare
AUTHORS’ NOTE
Our only agenda is to present the disturbing reality of what happened in the White House and the Democratic presidential campaign in 2023–2024, as told to us by approximately two hundred people, including lawmakers and White House and campaign insiders, some of whom may never acknowledge speaking to us but all of whom know the truth within these pages. Most of the information laid out in this book was shared with us after the election of 2024, when officials and aides felt considerably freer to talk. There are very few people named herein with whom we didn’t speak.
Our most important sources were Democrats inside and outside the White House who were grappling with how so many of them had been so focused on convincing voters that Donald Trump was a true existential threat to the nation that they put blinders on, participating in a charade that delivered the election directly into Trump’s hands.
Some spoke to us with regret that they hadn’t done more, or that they had waited so long to talk to the press about what was going on behind the scenes. Many were angry and felt deeply betrayed, not just by Biden but by his inner circle of advisers, his allies, and his family. They had seen bad moments behind the scenes but had been assured all was well. And then came the debate.
Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here. Nor will this book satisfy those seeking comfort that he was, through to the end, unaddled and perfectly capable of being president twenty-four seven; that his rumored deterioration was all right-wing propaganda. This is also false. As Biden’s presidency ended, it was difficult to find many top Democrats outside his immediate circle of family and closest aides who thought he could ably serve a second four-year term.
This book is not an exoneration of the candidacy or presidencies of Biden’s opponent, Donald Trump. Journalism about Biden does not excuse or normalize any actions and statements by anyone else, including the forty-fifth and now forty-seventh president. Indeed, for those who tried to justify the behavior described here because of the threat of a second Trump term, those fears should have shocked them into reality, not away from it.
The lessons from this book go beyond one man and one political party. They speak to more universal questions about cognitive dissonance, groupthink, courage, cowardice, and patriotism.
George Orwell once wrote that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite
time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
He was writing about World War II, but he could have been writing about any time, any era. “The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye,” Orwell went on. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
Here is what was in front of our noses.
—Jake and Alex
Original Sin
“He Totally Fucked Us”
President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged.
The elites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.
His pollsters told us that no such polls existed.
There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news.
It’s also true that for Biden to absorb those poll results, he would have had to face the biggest issue driving them: The public had concluded—long before most Democratic officials, media, and other “elites” had—that he was far too old to do the job. In truth, before that consequential June 27, 2024, presidential debate, many insiders—people with a much better window into Biden’s condition than the wider public had—saw things that shocked them. Most of them said nothing.
President Biden awoke the morning after the election sure that he was not to blame.
Two and a half miles away, north on Connecticut Avenue Northwest, then west on Massachusetts, Harris walked solemnly into the dining room of the vice president’s residence at the US Naval Observatory.
She was joined that morning by her husband, Doug Emhoff; her sister, Maya; and her brother-in-law Tony West. They were incredulous. It was real. It wasn’t a nightmare. It had really happened.
They knew that they’d been running from behind, that their challenge had been considerable: They’d had only 107 days to convince America that the vice president to a historically unpopular president would be a change agent. They had hoped that the margin of error in the polls they saw would break their way. The enthusiasm they felt on the trail was tangible. They were hopeful.
But overnight, the TV networks had called the race for Trump.
Sitting at the breakfast table, Harris knew she would have to call the president- elect and concede. And then she would have to finish the speech she never wanted to give.
Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, so goes an old saying President John F. Kennedy invoked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Few Democrats were running around claiming paternity of the political wipeout that was the 2024 campaign.
No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error.
But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden.
Harris, loyal to Biden to a fault, might never say such a thing. But plenty of people around her would.
“We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us.
Plouffe had served as Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign manager in 2008 and as a senior adviser to President Obama before largely retiring from politics in 2013. After Biden dropped out of the race on July 21, 2024, Plouffe was drafted to help Harris in what he saw as a “rescue mission.” Harris, he said, was a “great soldier,” but the compressed 107- day race was “a fucking nightmare.”
“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. Referring to Biden’s decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: “He totally fucked us.”
This isn’t the typical finger-pointing of a losing campaign.
Before the 2020 primaries, in December 2019, four Biden advisers— in what Politico reporter Ryan Lizza read as a strategic leak to get the idea out into the open—told Lizza that it would be “virtually inconceivable that he will run for reelection in 2024, when he would be the first octogenarian president.”
“Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,” Biden reiterated in March 2020 as he was on the verge of capturing the Democratic nomination.
Instead, supported by his senior advisers and his wife and family, the oldest president in American history announced in April 2023 that he would run again. This meant potentially being president until he was eighty-six.
The real issue wasn’t his age per se. It was the clear limitations of
his abilities, which got worse throughout his presidency. What the public saw of the realities of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse.
While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as president, there were several significant issues that complicated his presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments where he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate— ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.
It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But until the last day of his presidency, Joe Biden and those in his innermost circle refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered significantly. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it.
The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection—followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.
And then came the June 27 debate against Trump, when Biden’s decline was laid bare before the world.
It was not just one bad night, as Biden and his team claimed in the aftermath. Millions were shocked by Biden’s unintelligible, slack-jawed performance at the debate, but some Democrats weren’t surprised at all. Though they had seen him like this behind closed doors, they didn’t say anything. For a variety of reasons, they rationalized their silence.
As a result, Democrats stumbled into the fall of 2024 with an untested nominee and growing public mistrust of a White House that had been gaslighting the American people. With only three and a half months to run a campaign against a candidate and machine that had
been going pretty much full speed since 2015, Harris was fearful of distancing herself from her boss and publicly unable to acknowledge what the world continued to witness of his decline.
Harris made plenty of mistakes, both before Biden became a candidate and afterward, but no decision that she and her campaign made was anywhere near as consequential as his decision to run for reelection and pretend he wasn’t mentally melting before our eyes.
“It was an abomination,” one prominent Democratic strategist— who publicly defended Biden—told us. “He stole an election from the Democratic Party; he stole it from the American people.”
Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.
AnOTheR TOP DemOcRaT, one who spent much of 2023 and early 2024 publicly and privately defending the president and his acuity, spoke with White House and campaign officials regularly and received constant reassurance. “He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine,” they all said.
This was the experience of dozens of officials, from politicians to donors to left-leaning pundits.
In the spring of 2024, this Democrat called top White House officials. “Every day I’m defending this guy,” the top Democrat told them. “Someone tell me he’s okay. Like, it doesn’t look great. The press conferences don’t look great.” He was reassured every time, the top Democrat told us. “Anita [Dunn] told me he was fine; [Jeff] Zients told me he was fine. [Mike] Donilon goes, ‘I promise he’s okay.’ ”
In 2024, after Biden withdrew from the race, this Democrat privately met with the First Couple and saw the reality with their own eyes.
“He was not fine. She [the First Lady] had to complete some of his thoughts. It was not fine. I got emotional leaving the White House because he was clearly not fucking fine.”
The Democrat says they want to believe that Biden’s top aides “weren’t intentionally deceitful. I think sometimes people think the best. I think the theory was always ‘He’s a gamer; he’s going to deliver.’ And I think they believed that. But when you’re with him every day, they had to have moments like I had with him, where you were like, ‘Whoa, this is not okay.’ And at some point, you shut the door and say, ‘Hey, you’re not up to this.’ ”
Trump ended up winning the Electoral College by 312 to 226 electoral votes, and he secured the popular vote by more than 2.2 million. But the race was closer than those numbers suggest. Harris lost the three key “Blue Wall” states by a total of roughly 230,000 votes. If she had beat the margins of 1.44 percent in Michigan, 1.73 percent in Pennsylvania, and 0.87 percent in Wisconsin, she would be president today.
Ponder the question that Democrats such as Harris and others who might have run in 2024—Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Governor Gavin Newsom of California, Governor JB Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—replay in their minds: If Biden had not run for reelection, or if he had acknowledged his decay and changed his mind about it in 2023, what would have happened?
If history is any guide, a competitive primary and caucus process would have produced a stronger Democratic nominee, one who had more experience with debates and taking questions from reporters, one with a more cogent and precise answer as to why they were running, one with time to introduce themselves to the American people. Past flip-flops on issues would have been addressed, policy proposals would have been
fleshed out, winning messages would have been formed. The nominee would have figured out a way to respectfully but forcefully distance themselves from the unpopular incumbent president and forge a new path, representing change.
Would that candidate have been able to do 1.5 percentage points better in Michigan, 1.8 points better in Pennsylvania, and 0.9 points better in Wisconsin?
To the Plouffes of the world, it’s hard to argue no.
“If Biden had decided in 2023 to drop out, we would have had a robust primary,” Plouffe said. “Whitmer, Pritzker, Newsom, Buttigieg, Harris, and Klobuchar would have run. Warnock and Shapiro would have kicked the tires of it. Maybe Mark Cuban or a businessperson of some sort. Twenty percent of governors and thirty percent of senators would have thought about it. We would have been eminently stronger.”
Once it became clear to the world that Biden needed to drop out, Obama, former House Speaker Pelosi, and others pushed for some sort of open process in July and August. Biden’s refusal to budge until July 21 and then his immediate endorsement of Harris meant that this, too, fell by the wayside.
This isn’T hindsighT. Everyone saw it happening.
Throughout 2023 and into 2024, Biden’s gait grew stiffer, his voice softer. People would call Plouffe—the president looked frail and sounded weak. He would often do small fundraising events with the aid of a teleprompter and leave early. People ponying up big bucks would call Plouffe to ask if everything was okay. This wasn’t normal.
Plouffe asked folks at the White House and in the party if they were sure he could win. Yes, they said, noting that Biden had beaten
Trump in 2020, that the election cycle of 2022 wasn’t as bad as it could have been for Democrats, and that he was achieving FDR-level accomplishments. The Biden team also argued that if he didn’t run, Vice President Harris would likely be the nominee, and they had little confidence in her abilities.
Plouffe found that theory bizarre. No one had any idea who might win a contested round of Democratic primaries and caucuses. If—if — Harris emerged victorious, that would be because of those political abilities they were doubting. The most enraging part of their antiHarris argument? Biden was the one who had picked her to be his vice president.
It was 2023. Plouffe had retired from politics and his former boss, Barack Obama, was staying out of it. Biden was still pissed at Obama for not backing his possible presidential run in 2016, implicitly backing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Obama had never directly told Biden not to run, but he had encouraged his VP— still deeply grieving the loss of his son Beau—to focus on himself as a person. Plouffe had cautioned against a run— Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders were way too popular— and Obama political director David Simas had presented Biden with polling that showed the improbability of a victory.
“The president was not encouraging” is how Biden had put it.
Folks in the Obama camp felt that they had spared Biden from a third presidential primary disaster following his 1988 and 2008 failures. Then they rallied the party around him in 2020 because he had the best chance of beating Trump. He did, and many felt his was a presidency of accomplishment. Reviving the economy after COVID, getting vaccines into arms. A historic infrastructure bill. Boosting semiconductor manufacturing in the US. A bipartisan gun safety package.
In June 2023, Obama popped in on Biden for a visit. He wanted to
kick the tires, make sure the old guy was still up to it. Biden seemed fine— old, still Biden, but fine. Obama cautioned that Trump would be a formidable foe because of the increasingly polarized nation, Trump’s entrenched base, and the fractured media landscape.
“Just make sure you can win the race” is all Obama told Biden this time, notwithstanding any doubts.
What could Obama do? This was Biden’s decision.
He was, after all, the president.
These aRe The POLiTics, the what-ifs, of the original sin.
More concrete are the facts we uncovered about Biden’s health and abilities; the silence of witnesses; the complicity of enablers; and the scheming of those who endeavored to hide it from others and from the public.
As of early 2025, Biden can still, of course, engage in a coherent conversation if he is prepared and rested. Former top aides insist his decision-making is sound.
But the hours during which he can perform are limited. Since at least 2022, he has had moments where he cannot recall the names of top aides whom he sees every day. He can sometimes seem incoherent. He is increasingly prone to losing his train of thought, occasionally speaking so softly that he cannot be understood, even if he’s talking directly into a microphone.
The presidency requires someone who can perform at 2:00 a.m. during an emergency. Cabinet secretaries in his own administration told us that by 2024, he could not be relied upon for this.
What the world saw at his one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was underprepared or overprepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired. It was
the natural result of an eighty- one-year- old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.
What was the extent of it? Who knew about it? Was it a conspiracy? We will let the facts speak for themselves.
“Get Up!”
To grasp how Joe Biden could have decided to run for reelection at his historically advanced age, one must understand Biden’s own mythology. Even before one gets to his belief that he, and only he, was capable of defeating Donald Trump, consider the legend of Joe Biden and its grounding in exceeding expectations, defying odds, and surviving.
“Get up!” he wrote in his first memoir, Promises to Keep. “To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can’t learn at the feet of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you’ve been knocked down.”
A lesson from his father, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., who’d been knocked down hard but had “no time for self-pity.” His dad struggled. Biden Sr.’s crop- dusting business on Long Island went bust, and he
moved the family back to Scranton to live with his wife’s parents. Destitute, Biden Sr. couldn’t find work, so he started commuting to Delaware where he cleaned boilers and sold trinkets at the farmers’ market, eventually moving the rest of the family to join him.
“Champ, it’s not how many times you get knocked down,” Biden Sr. would tell his son. “It’s how quickly you get up.”
“Get up!” Biden wrote, “has echoed throughout my life.”
Get up!
The other kids in Scranton mocked Biden’s stutter. In high school, they dubbed him Joe Impedimenta or Dash—not because of his speed on the gridiron but because he spoke like Morse code, dot- dot- dashdash. Kids can be cruel; that’s why Biden took time out on the campaign trail to talk to children who also had stutters. They needed to know that they shouldn’t let the bullies define them by it.
Get up!
A little-known first-term New Castle county councilman in 1972, Biden took on Delaware’s popular GOP Senator James Caleb “Cale” Boggs. He attacked Boggs for being old (sixty-three) and out of touch. No one thought he could win. And then he did.
Only about a month later came that horrible day when his brother Jimmy, in Wilmington, Delaware, called his sister, Val, who was with Senator- elect Biden in a Hill office that Senator Robert Byrd had lent him. “There’s been a slight accident,” Val told him. “Nothing to be worried about. But we ought to go home.”
Biden’s wife, Neilia, and thirteen-month- old baby girl, Naomi, had been killed in a car crash. “I’m sorry, Joe, there was nothing we could do to save them,” he was told. Sons Beau and Hunter were banged up and in the hospital. It is hard to imagine the pain, the grief, the black hole in which Biden found himself.
Get up!
His 1988 presidential run ended in a plagiarism scandal before 1987 even ended.
A few months later, in February 1988, the headaches he’d been ignoring the previous year resulted in his being rushed to Saint Francis Hospital in Wilmington. His second wife, Jill, was told not to go into his hospital room because he was being given last rites. He had blood in his spinal fluid and a leaking aneurysm below the base of his brain. He was warned that the necessary brain surgery might cause him to lose his ability to speak. Jill pointed out that if he hadn’t withdrawn from the presidential race, he would have been campaigning in New Hampshire at the time his aneurysm began bleeding and he wouldn’t have stopped. “You wouldn’t be alive,” she said. “Things happen for a reason.”
Get up!
His 2008 presidential run also ended in an embarrassing flop— fifth place in Iowa with less than 1 percent of the vote.
But the winner and eventual nominee, Senator Barack Obama, picked him as his running mate, and Biden became one of the most consequential vice presidents in modern history, at times more popular than Obama.
Get up!
In May 2015, Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer. It crushed him.
His forty-five-year- old son, Hunter, spiraled into addiction and broke up his family. For the first time in decades, Biden said, he didn’t know his purpose.
Get up!
Biden ran again in 2020. Obama didn’t endorse him in the primaries and many in the media doubted him. But he won the nomination and beat Trump.
He saw himself as a man of historic achievements, akin to FDR and LBJ. America was flat on its back, and he saved the economy, he would say. Fifteen million new jobs! Eight hundred thousand in manufacturing! Unemployment under 4 percent for a record two years in a row! Infrastructure projects that would be felt for decades! The critics said it couldn’t be done, Biden would say. The press, the doubters, the elites— none of them ever thought he could do any of it.
Get up!
So to think that aging or ailment would make Biden reconsider his run is to not understand Joe Biden and the true believers with whom he surrounded himself. Fate had spent the better part of the last half century throwing everything it could at him, the worst tragedies imaginable.
And every goddamn time, he got up. Every. Goddamn. Time.
TO FamiLy and close aides, the mythology became almost a theology, a near-religious faith in Biden’s ability to rise again.
And as with any theology, skepticism was forbidden.
As one reporter who has closely covered Biden told us, “Biden literally says, ‘Keep the faith.’ Which means to say, don’t allow yourself to even question it. And it created a strange circle of groupthink where none of them would permit the other ones to demonstrate any doubt.”
Part of that theology is made up of narratives of questionable accuracy. The image of Joe— aviators, ice cream, 1967 Corvette— as avuncular and Jill as warm. These are not universally held impressions among those who know them well.
The president was fond of using the formal family motto, of giving “my word as a Biden,” but they had another, more private saying:
“Never call a fat person fat.” It wasn’t just about politesse; it was about ignoring ugly facts.
“Don’t say mean truths” is how someone close to the family put it.
“The Bidens’ greatest strength is living in their own reality,” this person told us. “And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn’t going to die. Hunter’s sobriety is stable. Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition . They stick to the narrative and repeat it.”
From 2020 until 2024, all of this resulted in an almost spiritual refusal to admit that Biden was declining.
There were some aides who appreciated the president but did not share their colleagues’ religious zeal. The Bidens’ closest aides, they told us, essentially hid his deterioration from the public and from others in the administration.
One senior White House aide who left because they didn’t think Biden should run again confessed to us that “we attempted to shield him from his own staff so many people didn’t realize the extent of the decline beginning in 2023.”
“I love Joe Biden,” the aide said. “When it comes to decency, there are few in politics like him. Still, it was a disservice to the country and to the party for his family and advisers to allow him to run again.”
The Politburo 2020
During an eight- day, grueling bus tour in Iowa in December 2019, Biden gave his aides pause. While doing prep, he struggled to remember the name of longtime aide Mike Donilon. “You know, you know,” he said, groping for it. His aides side- eyed one another—Donilon had worked with Biden since 1981.
It wasn’t the only time aides worried during the 2020 presidential primary. Biden’s campaign team saw that he was not always the guy he’d been as VP. His debate performances had never been commanding, but aides now found themselves white-knuckling their way through them. And his team often shied away from tough interviews, even though Biden had spent his career being one of the most press-friendly senators. He struggled to communicate the way he once had.
In the office, campaign aides would whisper about how he was not
always 100 percent, but there was no way to have that conversation with him or his most senior aides. It was almost taboo.
It was as if there were two Bidens. He’d have high- energy rallies and then events where his own staff winced at his meandering and subdued performance.
Still, Good Biden was far more present than Old Biden.
Some aides became alarmed, though, after that bus tour through Iowa in December. With the caucuses just weeks away, Biden hit the trail hard but had trouble bouncing back.
At events in Iowa in January 2020, aides privately noted that voters were seeing a diminished man who was not as he had been just two months earlier. Voters were coming out of Biden’s events less likely to support him. Precinct captains disappeared or said no thanks after attending a Biden rally.
His team knew he wasn’t the best speaker, but they believed that his decision-making remained sharp, and that he was the best candidate to defeat Trump. That’s what mattered most in the end.
ThOse cLOse TO him say that the first signs he was deteriorating emerged after the death of his beloved son Beau in 2015. Biden often referred to Beau—Joseph Robinette Biden III—as an upgraded version of himself. He was the heir apparent, groomed to be the Biden who would finally become president. An army officer and veteran of the Iraq war, a husband and father, Beau lived a mere mile away from his parents. He had twice been elected Delaware’s attorney general, in 2006 and 2010, and planned to run for governor in 2016. By the end of 2012, Beau had already begun organizing for a potential White House run, hiring a national fundraiser and crisscrossing the country.
When Beau died from glioblastoma in May 2015 at age forty-six, Biden was devastated.
It was the rare funeral where he did not give a eulogy. He couldn’t. His grief seemed to break something inside him. A senior White House official at the time told us that “parts of Biden’s brain and mental capacity seemed to dissolve like someone poured hot water on [them]. Anyone who spent ten minutes with him when it was clear Beau was going to die in those last six to nine months could see it.”
Others close to Biden noticed it too. “Beau’s death aged him significantly,” said a longtime Biden confidant. “His shoulders looked smaller. His face looked more gaunt. In his eyes, you could just see it.”
Biden’s torment was compounded by his younger son, Hunter, spiraling into crack cocaine addiction. His and Jill’s daughter, Ashley, also battled addiction.
Biden was intensely private about what was going on with his family, but aides could hear Hunter yelling at his dad on the other end of the line during phone calls between the two. When bad news about Hunter came— and it was usually bad—Biden would grow unusually quiet. He seemed to be losing both of his sons at the same time.
Beau’s canceR TReaTmenT also demonstrated the Bidens’ capacity for denial and the lengths they would go to avoid transparency about health issues, even when the person in question is an elected official, in this case the sitting attorney general of Delaware.
In the summer of 2013, Beau collapsed during a family vacation and underwent brain surgery to remove a tumor. “Beau’s tumor was definitely glioblastoma. Stage IV,” Biden later wrote about the postoperative findings. “It was a death sentence,” Hunter wrote. Beau began limiting