—We are going to lose our fucking democracy because of you! —accused, beside himself, the acclaimed Hollywood director Rob Reiner a Douglas Emhoffhusband of the then vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris.
It was the end of June. The second gentleman followed—stunned, like the rest of the world—the first presidential debate between Joe Biden y Donald Trump from inside Holmby Hills, a modernist mansion in Los Angeles owned by James Costosambassador to Spain during the presidency of Barack Obamawhen Reiner lost his temper.
Biden’s unintelligible babbling during the 90-minute broadcast drove the illustrious attendees at the event, who included three prominent Democratic governors, out of their minds. and the actress Jane Fondawho looked “just as distraught,” of course, as her friend Reiner, another self-confessed Democrat usually in charge of fundraising.
Biden did not present his best version that night, of course. The world learned at that time of the cognitive deterioration suffered by the president of the United States. A drift that many had perceived due to his multiple slips—both verbal and physical—in his public appearances. There was no turning back, and the Democrats knew it then.
Reiner’s desperate accusation of Emhoff is one of the unusual passages that, eleven months after the debate, journalists Jake Tapper y Alex Thompson collect in your book Original Sin (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025), a chronicle that, as its cover anticipates, delves into “the deterioration of President Biden, his cover-up and his disastrous decision to run again.”
Trump took advantage of the publication of the book to criticize his predecessor. One week after the release of the imminent bestsellerHowever, the former president’s entourage announced that Biden suffered from advanced prostate cancer. Metastasis.
The delicate state of health of the Democratic leader did not, in any case, stop Trump’s attacks. This Wednesday, the US president decided to open an investigation to clarify, he says, whether Biden covered up the deterioration of his cognitive abilities while he occupied the White House.
Trump’s move is unprecedented in American history. The investigations he is promoting aim to determine whether Biden’s health condition made him unable to make decisions. If so, the investigation could invalidate thousands of executive orders and pardons issued during the previous Administration.
The executive order focuses on the use of autopena machine that uses real ink to duplicate a human signature. Trump wants to know if his advisors used it legitimately or did it to hide Biden’s inability to sign his signature on executive orders.
As determined two decades ago by the Office of Legal Counsel of the Department of Justice, a president does not need to personally sign an official document for it to be considered valid. In fact, Trump himself uses this method for routine correspondence.
None of that matters. In any case, Trump’s order emphasizes the pardons that Biden granted in the final stretch of his mandate. Pardons that, in addition to benefiting some of his relatives, commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 people on death row.
“In recent months, it has become increasingly evident that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of presidential signatures by using the autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive impairment and exercise Article II authority,” states the order signed by Trump.
“This conspiracy represents one of the most dangerous and worrying scandals in American history. The American public was deliberately shielded from knowing who exercised executive power, while Biden’s signature was used on thousands of documents to implement radical policy changes,” the note states.
Trump wants to support the hypothesis that, in reality, Biden did not make the decisions; that his assistants governed. According to this logic, Biden only appeared. And even that didn’t do it very well.
Biden was quick to respond to Trump’s order. “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions on pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations. Any suggestion that I did not do so is ridiculous and false,” he concluded his statement.
Republicans have no intention of letting this moment pass. Several members of the party want the former first lady Jill Biden testify in Congress about her husband’s cognitive status. A request that even Trump considered excessive. For once, the president had to stop his forces.
“She is the wife of a man who was going through a lot of problems, and everyone who dealt with him understood that. And I guess that was clear during the debate,” acknowledged Trump, who, however, does not intend to let go of this topic either.
Shift focus
Because? And, above all, why now? “Trump’s agenda has encountered several obstacles: Elon Musk destroying the Big Beautiful Billthe fight over tariffs and the lack of new replacement trade agreements, and other tremors in the economic engine. So it’s no surprise that I want bad memories about Biden to be at the center of the news cycle,” he responds. Jim Geraghtysenior political correspondent for National Review and columnist in The Washington Post.
“Biden’s mental state in the final months (years?) of his presidency is truly a scandal, but it will be difficult for the US Department of Justice to criminally charge anyone unless someone comes forward and confesses to a crime or claims to have witnessed an actual crime — that is: I saw such a person use the autopen to forge the president’s signature on official documents”, Geraghty tells this newspaper.
“It is most likely that Biden signed documents that were inaccurately described to him and that he did not read himself, or that he signed documents and then forgot about them,” maintains the columnist of the Post.
Gaslighting
The environment closest to Biden, the Democratic leaders, the close media. They all did gaslighting or gaslighting, in a more or less premeditated way, to avoid the president’s cognitive drift when, in reality, there were signs that suggested that the issue could blow up his candidacy.
The most obvious is the report he wrote Robert Howthe special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur, who chose not to press charges against the then-president, justified his decision by claiming in his writing that Biden “would appear to be a sympathetic figure to a jury for being an old man with a defective memory.”
The Democrats, however, desperately wanted to cling to the version that Biden presented, without going any further, in the State of the Union debate in early March of last year.
In Original SinTapper and Thompson collect the reasons that led to Hakeem Jeffriesthen leader of the Democratic minority in Congress, to close ranks with Biden. “Haven’t people seen it during the State of the Union? Did they understand how crucial that speech was, given at 9:00 pm in a hostile environment, with provocateurs like the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to get him out of concentration? “Biden walked straight into the lion’s den an hour before the speech and stuck his head in the jaws of the beast: he posed for selfies, he took his time walking down the hallway,” they write.
With the notable exception of Congressman Dean Phillipsthe Democrats remained closed in band until the night of the fateful debate. Above all, the greatest exponents of the left wing of the party, to whom Biden had given some joy during his mandate.
Biden’s determination to run again, despite having assured that he was “a transitional president,” opened the first cracks in the Democratic coalition. What remains of all that now? What status does Biden have among his party colleagues? “A little above the foot fungus,” says Geraghty.
“Biden was always this talkative, slip-up-prone, back-slapping veteran politician, but Democrats adored him when he was the man who ended Trump’s presidency,” the columnist notes. Post—. “Now he is destined to be remembered as the guy who helped Trump come back, who ran for another term when he was too old, who denied that reality for too long, and who chose as his running mate Kamala Harris, who couldn’t beat Trump.”