OPINION:
Veteran reporters Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper released their book, “Original Sin,” last month, and it’s still making waves. The book details the protective shield liberals in and out of government threw up to deny the obvious: The president of the United States was slipping into dementia and no longer capable of serving as commander in chief. The Biden team almost proudly justifies doing so as necessary to save the republic from the “existential threat posed by Donald Trump.”
Most of the book’s reviewers have focused on the almost unimaginable hypocrisy of Jake Tapper’s written and oral denial that he knowingly helped in the most shocking political cover-up of the past 100 years. Without anything even approaching an apology, Mr. Tapper and his co-author argue that they and most of the media shouldn’t be blamed for swallowing and parroting the White House line.
Mr. Tapper’s desperate attempt to claw his way back into what passes for journalistic respectability has included hiring crisis public relations managers and lying to fellow journalists about providing him with a microphone when they should be shunning him for sullying not just his own journalistic reputation but theirs as well.
Yet the real story is not Mr. Tapper’s role but the extent to which President Biden’s coterie of aides, family members and outside media supporters undermined the very democracy they tell us they were defending. They remind one of the Vietnam-era army officer who defended the destruction of a village, arguing that “we had to destroy the village to save it.” Mr. Biden’s public appearance provided almost daily evidence of his deteriorating mental abilities to anyone willing to watch him walk or speak. The major media almost universally claimed conservatives were unhinged conspiracy theorists. Yet we now know Mr. Biden was kept in a bubble by a family and staff who convinced themselves it was their duty to “protect” the country by surreptitiously assuming the powers of the presidency themselves.
It must have been quite a thrill to members of what one Biden staffer told the authors they informally called the White House “Politburo,” who went about making the decisions that the nation’s founders, the Constitution and any credible theory of democracy reserved for the elected president. This is heady and frightening stuff, especially as we learn that the two most influential members were the president’s wife and his drug-addicted grifter of a son, whom Mr. Biden insists is “the smartest guy I know.”
One Biden aide told the authors that his staff considered stopping Mr. Trump as a sufficient reason to hide their boss while supplanting him as the White House decision-maker, and he doesn’t seem to have second thoughts about it. In justifying these actions, he told Mr. Thompson, “When you’re voting for president, you’re voting for the aides around him.”
Like some true believers in one cause or another, these aides see elections and the democratic process as a convenience as long as they come out on top. They are willing to jettison the entire process if they believe the “wrong” people might win. This is exactly what the Biden team did.
While being interviewed by Fox News’ Shannon Bream, Mr. Thompson summed up the attitude of the Biden crew. “If you believe, and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe, that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy, you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things.” This sort of rationalization was used to justify “canceling” those with whom they disagreed, demonizing opponents, lying and spying on fellow citizens. The Biden Politburo did all this and more as they systematically undermined the very democracy they would now have us believe they were fighting to save.
Mr. Thompson reports that those around Mr. Biden “sincerely believed” they were saving democracy by destroying or at least suspending that very democracy. Many extremists, including the terrorists who brought down the Twin Towers, racists and authoritarian dictators, “sincerely” believe they are justified in pursuing their goals. Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Adolf Hitler were sincere, but that didn’t make any of what they sincerely believed acceptable in a civilized world.
Misplaced “sincerity” of the sort the Biden team used to justify their actions creates monsters. We are now learning that monsters were serving as members of a White House staff that believed when the American people elected their boss in 2020, they were voting to give them the same powers they gave him.
That was wrong. Worse, it led them to unconstitutional and criminal acts for which they must be held accountable. If they aren’t, we will have acquiesced in an illegal power grab that makes a mockery of the Constitution and our laws.
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.