Why Is the Media Still Obsessed With Biden’s Health?

In the past month alone, the current president of the United States of America has: 

Defied the Constitution by ignoring court orders to stop kidnapping and disappearing legal immigrants to international torture sites. 

Proposed a budget cutting vital services like Medicaid and scientific research in ways that will devastate already disadvantaged communities across the country.

Harassed a teenage girl online for winning a track meet, promising to bring the entire might of the federal government down on a single high school athlete for being transgender.

Gave condolences to the chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, on D-Day, assuming that Merz was on the side of the Nazi regime and thus was disheartened by the Allies landing at Normandy. 

Fired the first Black woman to lead the Library of Congress and sent his press secretary out to accuse her of providing “inappropriate material” to children at an institution that does not allow children to check out materials at all.

Amplified conspiracy theories online that his predecessor had been replaced by a clone, proposed tariffs and then rescinded them and then re-proposed them, throwing the stock market into freefall, called the Supreme Court “radical left losers” and wished his “haters” a happy Memorial Day. 

To listen to the Washington, D.C.–based press corps, however, the year’s most important story is that former President Joe Biden is old, forgetful, and got tired on the job, and that his aides weren’t exactly screaming from the rooftops that he forgot things now and then.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson have been carpet-bombing the airwaves with news about their new book, Original Sin, which details the end of Biden’s presidency and his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the book alleges that Biden was in severe mental decline, and should never have tried to run again. They write: 

Original Sin … makes a lot of [Biden’s] inability to remember the names of close associates—as he did in December 2022, when, in an encounter just outside the Oval Office, the book describes him calling Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, “Steve” and Kate Beddingfield, the communications director, “Press”—even as the authors note elsewhere that he had displayed the same recall difficulty with Mike Donilon, perhaps his closest aide, on at least one occasion in 2019, when everyone seems to think Biden was still in good shape.

Tapper and Thompson are selling the thing like it’s going out of style, and their colleagues in the corporate media are only too happy to help. Scores of stories detailing what Tapper and Thompson wrote, with objective journalism language like “shocking” and “damning,” appearances on podcasts and in opinion columns and excerpts published in newspapers, all of it about the last administration and what might and might not have been said and done in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election. 

Even grading on the curve that is the white male journalist circle jerk, Tapper and Thompson were overexposed on CNN, featured with book in hand, and other networks reported on what Tapper and Thompson said in other interviews. Not even Biden’s actual cancer diagnosis could deter CNN from bringing the conversation back to the book and its contents. The result was the kind of narrative drumbeat journalists love to pretend they don’t produce: 

Story after story at top volume, as Trump’s appointees gave away state secrets on unsecured mobile apps and undermined disease prevention by attacking vaccines. When Trump used the presidency to promote a cryptocurrency scam coin, CNN headlined it as “just another day in Trumpland:”

Trump’s juggling of critical global and domestic issues defines a presidency that constantly scans the horizons for “wins” that can animate a day with photo-ops. But the show is often erratic, reflecting his own volcanic temperament and disregard for constitutional impediments. And no one can be sure what happens next in a Washington maelstrom that is part of his appeal for supporters.

But Trump’s flexibility and willingness to drop everything for a deal can open some avenues that might be closed to more conventional presidents.

If there’s a single redeeming factor here, it’s that people aren’t buying what Tapper and Thompson can’t stop selling. Tapper’s CNN show dropped 25 percent in the ratings compared to last year and his book sales, while strong enough in the first week to land him on the New York Times bestseller list, no one much cared once they found out what was in it.

Tapper and Thompson sold Original Sin as a groundbreaking scandal, a double-triple-quadruple Watergate, sure to have lasting consequences for the Democratic Party as it looks toward the 2026 and 2028 elections. 

But with Trump melting down daily on social media, feuding with Elon Musk and other advisors, shoving his foot into his mouth at every international meetup, waffling on tariffs and raging at random teenage athletes, it’s hard to see how people will be paying attention to Joe Biden a year from now.

Three years from now, ordinary people are far more likely to look back at Biden’s presidency—competently managed government functioning as it should, with basic services provided reliably as a matter of course—as an island of sanity between Trump’s two sadistic terms. Voters are far more likely to be consumed with the candidates running at that point; that is, the percentage of voters who aren’t Googling “who is running” on their way to the polls. 

That may be disappointing to politics-poisoned pundits like Tapper and Thompson, but perhaps they’ll learn that scandals are happening every single day, and Trump’s involve state-sanctioned kidnappings, shuttering museums, firing veterans and scamming people out of their Social Security benefits. 

Which might be slightly more consequential than forgetting someone’s name.