Names and Faces: Here’s Who Was Actually Running the Country When Joe Biden Was ‘President’
24th May 2025
Recent books about the 2024 election, including the just-published Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, have made clear what was obvious to most Americans with eyes and ears: Joe Biden was not fit to serve as president for another four years, and was more than likely unfit to serve from day one. They have also provided a clearer picture of who was actually running the country this whole time: a cadre of Biden loyalists who became addicted to the perks of power and did everything they could to stay in charge.
Oliver Darcy, a partisan hack who worked with Tapper at CNN and shamelessly defended Biden at every turn, still doesn’t think Biden’s conservative critics were right all along. The damning revelations in Original Sin and other books about the election, Darcy writes, do not validate “the deeply irresponsible narrative right-wing media spun for years: that the president of the United States was a mentally incapacitated puppet with dementia, unaware of his own surroundings, and propped up by a ‘shadow government’ running the country in his name.”
It’s pretty clear that Darcy hasn’t read Original Sin, in which Biden aides openly (albeit anonymously) admit that this is precisely what happened. “Five people were running the country, and Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” said one source close to the White House. Thompson told the New Yorker that some less influential Biden aides believed there would have been a “constitutional crisis” if Biden won a second term because “clearly the people in his inner circle were not willing to cede power.” They didn’t care that Biden was a walking corpse, they just wanted to get him across the finish line. “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years—he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while,” said a longtime Biden aide who was eager to continue running the country while Biden wasted away in hospice care. “When you vote for somebody, you are voting for the people around them too.”