This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Joe Biden often forgot top White House aides’ names, occasionally resorting to shorthand descriptions of roles like “Press” for longtime communications chief Kate Bedingfield. There was discussions of him possibly needing a wheelchair in a second term, and he sometimes ate dinner as early as 4:30 p.m. He seemed completely unfazed by a jarring debate performance that sent the Democrats into a spiral and put donations on ice. While attending a glitzy Hollywood fundraiser for his crumbling re-election campaign, he at one point blanked when face to face with George Clooney, one of the biggest stars in the world. These are just some of the details contained in the stunning and excellent Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again from journalists Alex Thompason of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN. Through more than 200 interviews with Biden insiders after Election Day, Democratic operatives, and frustrated loyalists who feel betrayed, the pair paints a damning portrait of an insular President whose team coddled him to the point of severely limiting his evening bookings, shielding him from bad news, and letting him continue to spout information that was objectively not true. To say this book has been the talk of the town would undersell its current buzzy dominance. Even when Biden revealed a prostate cancer diagnosis on Sunday, it was hard to digest the news outside of the conversation reignited by Original Sin about how much Biden and his team were hiding about Biden’s capabilities to continue the job for four more years. Before the announcement of that cancer diagnosis, I sat down with Thompson for a chat about this project, which is out today. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. TIME: What was Biden's team thinking? Thompson: I think in every political organization, regardless of party, there's a tension of loyalty to your principal and loyalty to the bigger mission. In Biden's camp, the tug of war clearly went to the side that cared more about him and themselves than they cared about the larger mission, the White House and the country. And I think that's how they rationalized, not just having him run for reelection, but rationalizing that this guy could do the job for four more years. Many believed that it eventually would've precipitated into a constitutional crisis because he would've not been up to the job. And the people around him were not willing to admit it. None of them confronted the principal. That's telling about the culture that was created in which questioning or stress-testing created suspicions of disloyalty. Who created that culture?
