Phelim McAleer: People may be buying the book but they’re not buying the story

And so we come to the hottest book of the moment, Original Sin by journalists Alex Thompson of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN.

In this book Tapper and Thompson claim to be shocked, shocked to find out that there was senility going on in the Biden White House.

And they claim that it was covered up and hidden from the Serious American Journalists who were searching exhaustively for stories without fear or favour.

This would be fine except that the evidence of Biden’s inability to govern was sitting in plain view - even to those who didn't have the special access granted to the Serious American Journalist.

In May 2024, I was visiting Ireland and met a friend in a Dublin restaurant. She was one of those Irish people fascinated with American politics.

She would watch the American news channels on YouTube and know who was in and who was out. Her idea of a dream holiday was to go to an inauguration or a party convention.

And we immediately got to discussing who was going to be replacing Joe Biden as the Democrat candidate for president. It was obvious to her that there was no way Biden was going to be the candidate because of his obvious senility. And this was almost two months before the presidential debate where his cognitive decline became undeniable.

For my friend, even though she lived several thousand miles away, it was obvious then that President Biden was not cognitively up to the job.

However we are now being asked to believe that Biden's decline was not obvious to the thousands of journalists whose job it was to report about the minutiae of the Biden presidency.

Biden’s decline was as long as it was obvious.

In September 2022 at a meeting in the White House he was frustrated when a congresswoman did not respond to his shout outs. She was unable to respond due to her very public death in a car accident just four weeks previously.

Biden was so feeble he had to change the way he left and entered Air Force One but this all went unnoticed by the Serious American Journalist. In his 2022 State of the Union address he was unable to read his teleprompter and said “Iranian” when he meant “Ukrainian,” “America” when he meant “Delaware” and “profits” when he meant “prices”.

Then in November of the same year he said inflation was caused by the war in Iraq when he meant to say Ukraine - then said he was confused because his son died there. His son Beau BIden returned from Iraq in 2009 and died of brain cancer in his home in 2015.

My personal favourite was how during his visit to Ireland, President Biden called New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team the “Black and Tans”. He was not joking.

There was no shortage of examples from the funny to the serious that were all apparently missed by the Serious American Journalists.

Of course they were not missed. The Serious American Journalist views themselves as more than mere reporters. They are the moral guides of a nation that had lost its way by electing Trump and then daring to become disillusioned with the Biden administration.

Biden’s disastrous performance at the June 2024 presidential debate meant they were forced to report the facts not their fantasy and they are now claiming the Serious American Journalists were the victims of a massive cover-up. Tapper and Thompson are leading the charge.

Original Sin has become a bestseller. However people may be buying their book but no one is buying their story.

According to a recent Gallup poll only 31 per cent of Americans trust the media a great deal, but two thirds of the country don't trust it very much, with half of those saying they have no trust at all in the Serious American Journalist.

They only have themselves to blame.

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l Phelim McAleer is a journalist/producer based in Los Angeles. He produced the movie Gosnell, The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer and co-wrote the New York Times best-selling book Gosnell, The Untold Story of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. He produced the true crime podcast Serial Killer - A True Crime podcast based on the Gosnell story.