Biden’s health had already been in the news due to a slew of books being released on the 2024 presidential race.
The next one to hit bookshelves, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, has the most bombastic title of the recent releases — and it raises deeper questions about geriatric care planning, wellness tracking for seniors, and the cost of long-term chronic illness.
In an excerpt of the book, which will be released Tuesday, aides discussed putting Biden in a wheelchair after the election, because his physical deterioration, “most apparent in his halting walk,” had become so severe. Mobility support and home healthcare coverage are often essential at this stage, and can vary based on health insurance plan limitations.
In Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes wrote that Biden needed fluorescent tape to guide him through a fundraiser, a sign of cognitive disorientation sometimes linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s or dementia — which require early-stage diagnostic screening and legal care planning.
Author Chris Whipple, who wrote Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, said on CNN last month that “this was different from a cover-up.”
“It wasn’t a Watergate-style cover-up. It wasn’t a grand conspiracy as Karl Rove has described it,” Whipple said.
“The closest advisers to Biden believed, despite all the evidence, that Joe Biden was capable of running for reelection, of winning and of serving another four years,” Whipple said. “Now it was really delusional.”
