The Gaza Genocide Is Biden’s True ‘Original Sin’

“Original Sin” was an odd title choice for the recent book, co-authored by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and subtitled “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and his Disastrous Decision to Run Again.” The book confirms long-standing suspicions about former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, its handling by Biden’s inner circle, and the Democratic Party leadership’s attempts to conceal it.

These may be sins, but they’re hardly “original.” The earliest confirmed cover-up of presidential incapacity goes back over a century, to President Woodrow Wilson’s 1919 stroke. Ronald Reagan’s aides were so concerned about his inattentiveness, competence, and mood that they proposed invoking the 25th Amendment.^[1] Questions about Biden’s cognition were already circulating in Washington by the mid-2010s and were openly discussed during the 2020 election.

In the long arc of history, political cover-ups and lies are relatively venal sins. But genocide is a mortal sin—the worst imaginable.

Meanwhile, the conversation around this book is distracting us from the worst sin of all: genocide.

Out of Sync

American complicity in Palestinian slaughter isn’t “original,” of course; it has a long history. The Biden team’s originality lay in its open disregard for international law and global institutions. They defied the world court system well before Trump did.

Genocide is the worst crime human beings can commit. In the case, it’s also the one nobody’s talking about—even though it cost Democrats the 2024 election.

Other factors affected the outcome, too, of course, but many people predicted that the Gaza genocide would hurt the Democrats^[2], perhaps fatally—and all indicators are that it did.

It will continue to hurt them for the foreseeable future. Pew Research reports that, as of March 2025, 53% of Americans held “a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Israel.” That includes more than two-thirds of all Democrats—at a time when the party’s approval rating has plummeted^[3] and it desperately needs renewed enthusiasm among its base voters.

Silent Running

Except for a brief cease-fire, President Donald Trump has continued his predecessor’s assault on Palestine. That’s something we’re all morally obligated to resist. But Democrats, and the equally complicit media, must be held responsible for their actions—actions that made the Trump presidency possible.

When’s the last time anyone believed that the Democratic Party could be persuaded to change just because it was the right thing to do?

No wonder they want to keep talking about Joe Biden. But Biden is gone. If they were serious about changing, Democrats would ask themselves why they let the charade to go on for so long. A few initial answers: big-donor money, disregard for popular opinion^[4], a pronounced detachment from the experience of working people, and a party culture of self-advancement and sucking up to power.

What they wouldn’t do is fixate on superficial questions of messaging or image. The problem isn’t their choice of language; it’s not even their “gerontocracy,” as pronounced as that is. The problem is the forces behind their use of language, their perpetuation of incumbent power, and their ossification of thought. These forces stem from the party’s dependence on big money in its various corrupting forms.

A Heaven of Hell

I thought I past being shocked by the behavior of liberal politicians after they’ve been embraced and seduced by the tentacular flow of big money—that never-ending flow of cash which remolds their perceptions as they sit through think-tank conferences, fawning interviews, desserts and conversation at fundraising dinners, or drinks with lobbyists in cigar-scented wood-paneled rooms.

Horrors like the Gaza genocide are transcendental evils, but they’re born in mundane places like these.

And yet, Democrats seem reluctant to sacrifice these pleasures for anything as banal as winning elections. I’m sure that Tapper’s book makes lively conversations at their gatherings. And those conversations mean they don’t have to talk about genocide.

In the long arc of history, political cover-ups and lies are relatively venal sins. But genocide is a mortal sin—the worst imaginable. This one cost the Democrats the presidency in 2024. Unless they change, it will continue to cost them for years and decades to come.

Postscript

A lot of left-leaning columns, including this one, make a habit of citing poll numbers. I think we do it because we hope (sometimes consciously, sometimes not) that we may yet persuade Democrats to govern more humanely—if only out of self-interest.

But since we’re talking about sin, here’s a question: When’s the last time anyone believed that the Democratic Party could be persuaded to change just because it was the right thing to do?

^[1] There’s no conclusive proof that Reagan was mentally impaired while in office, although it’s still widely suspected. A clinical analysis of Reagan’s press conferences later concluded that he used a progressively smaller vocabulary as time passed, a pattern that is “associated with the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease.” Reagan announced that he had dementia in 1994, six years after leaving office.

^[2] I called Gaza “Biden’s Vietnam” in November 2023 and warned it could hurt his presidency in much the say way as Vietnam hurt Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. The Arab American Institute’s September 2024 poll showed a catastrophic drop in Arab-American voter support. I used AAI’s data on swing states, cross-referenced it with other voter groups in those states who felt strongly about Israel-Palestine (non-Arab Muslims, Black people, and college students), and concluded in October that the election could be lost on the Gaza issue alone. Many others reached the same conclusion.

^[3] As of late May 2025, only 36% of those surveyed in an Economist/YouGov poll viewed the Democratic Party favorably while 57% viewed it unfavorably. Republicans fared better, with 41% favorable versus 52% unfavorable. (Still, these results suggest that Americans aren’t very happy with their choices.)

^[4] By the end of his first year in office, a Politico/Morning Consult poll showed that voter confidence in Biden’s fitness had plunged, with only 40% agreeing that Biden was “in good health” and 50% disagreeing. Only 46% agreed he was mentally fit for office. At roughly the same time, nearly 60% of voters surveyed told Harvard-Harris pollsters that Biden was too old to be president. By July 2022, two-thirds of Democrats polled said they wanted someone else to lead their party’s ticket in 2024. Roots Action began a “Don’t Run Joe” campaign in 2022.