How Groupthink Protected Biden and Re-elected Trump

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is about a seemingly simple question: Was there a Joe Biden cover-up? Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book argues there was. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” details how Biden’s top advisers closed the circle around him and tried to conceal the extent of his decline. But I think the story here is more complicated. If Biden’s top advisers were misleading the public, I think they were also lying to themselves. And if there was a cover-up, it had a lot of holes; voters had been telling pollsters they were worried about Biden’s age for years. So I wanted to have Tapper on the show to talk about the discoveries in his book, but also about some of the bigger questions raised by the Democratic Party’s decision to almost renominate Biden: How do you see what is right in front of your eyes? How do you avoid letting loyalty to a person or a party blind you? This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by Ezra Klein “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping” by Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes Book Recommendations: Lorne by Susan Morrison Hitler’s People by Richard Evans The Holy Roller by Andy Samberg, Joe Trohman and Rick Remender Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Kelsey Kudak. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The This episode is about a seemingly simple question.
0:35.4	Was there a Joe Biden cover-up?
0:40.0	Like a lot of people, I was worried about Biden's age when he ran for president in 2020. So after he won, I found myself continuously asking
0:46.4	top white house staffers, how's the president? How's he in meetings? What's his energy like?
0:53.3	I always got the same answer. He's great,
0:55.9	completely in command. His energy is amazing. These are people I'd known for a long time.
1:02.2	I don't think they were lying to me. The harder question, in retrospect, was whether they were
1:07.0	lying to themselves. The White House, I came to think, had created this
1:12.0	false distinction in their minds. They would admit, privately, publicly even, that Biden
1:17.6	couldn't communicate as he'd once been able to. But that was just theatrics. The real work
1:23.0	of the presidency, they always told me, it was decision-making, and it was in decision-making that they believed
1:28.2	Biden shined. That never made sense to me. In what possible definition of the presidency,
1:34.8	in what possible definition of running a re-election campaign, is the ability to communicate with the
1:40.0	public, not core to the job? And how can you believe that that had degraded, but nothing else
1:46.5	had? We all know the story from there. Biden's collapse in the presidential debate, the push to
1:53.7	move him from the ticket, Kamala Harris' sprint of a campaign, Donald Trump's return to the White
1:59.6	House. And in the last couple of months, I feel like I've
2:03.2	watched a new conventional wisdom solidify. When I was writing pieces about how Biden shouldn't
2:07.8	run again, I got raked over the coals. I will say it was definitely not something everybody believed.
2:14.4	But now the argument is that everybody knew he was incapable of handling the job of the presidency,
2:19.7	that they knew it and they were covering it up.
	...

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