Gough: A Cover-Up of a Cover-Up
By Kyle Gough
To write “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson conducted what is perhaps the most pertinent investigation in the American political theater since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal.
But unlike Woodward and Bernstein, who exposed President Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate burglary, Tapper and Thompson merely and inexplicably conclude what the reader already knows — that attempting to conceal the President’s cognitive decline doomed the Democrats to defeat in the 2024 presidential election. We did not need a treatise on how Nixon’s actions led to Ford becoming President, nor did we need one on how Biden’s failures led to Trump’s re-election.
What we do need, and what Tapper and Thompson fail to deliver, is a book exposing and expounding on the real scandal — by attempting to conceal President Biden’s declining mental acuity, the Democrats handed control of the executive branch to a surreptitious, unelected oligarchy. The authors chose to call this oligarchy the “Politburo,” a term customarily used to describe the policymaking unit of a communist party. It is a curious choice; in the 20th century, politburo-directed communist regimes were responsible for approximately 100 million deaths.
The irony is biting: Tapper and Thompson call it a Politburo but fail to recognize its significance as a threat to our democracy. They make no mention of anything extraordinary the oligarchy did or could have done. Absent are discussions of potential abuse of the autopen, whether a bill signed by an incapacitated president can become law, why the 25th amendment was not invoked, or who had the codes to the nuclear football.
In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle embodied it, and a complicit legacy media enabled it. Tapper and Thompson (along with many of their colleagues in the legacy media) still inexplicably believe Donald Trump is the greater threat. To them, an agreeable oligarchy is better than a disagreeable but duly elected president. 
What’s worse, this oligarchy came perilously close to staying in power for a 2nd term. The big mistake they made was letting President Biden debate former President Trump on June 27 last year. Thanks to complacency by the legacy media, left-leaning voters were apparently shocked by what happened on that stage. Had the debate not occurred (or started earlier), left-leaning voters may have put the oligarchy back in office for four more years. With less to lose, the Politburo would have been even more of an existential threat.
“Original Sin” could have been the referendum on the media that this country needs to restore its faith in journalism. It could have diffused the overuse of misplaced, polarizing political rhetoric. Instead, by ignoring obvious storylines and failing to arrive at salient conclusions, Tapper and Thompson chose to run interference for the Left and for the legacy media. They make no mention of the discrepancy between how the conservative media and the legacy media covered this and related stories, such as the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s laptop and Ashley Biden’s diary.
Their failure to expose the real scandal illustrates their continued lack of impartiality and humility, which has doomed their book to irrelevance. Before long, discounted copies of this book will be available at thrift stores near you.
Kyle Gough, a Fort Wayne attorney and adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, is host of a weekly advice segment on WOWO radio. He is the former board chair of the Cole Center YMCA and cofounder of a non-profit that provided computers to underprivileged youth.
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