Whatever prevented the Washington media from telling the full story of Joe Biden’s declining health, that spell has been broken. Indeed, the same people who turned a blind eye to the president’s mental state are now buzzing about Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s forthcoming book, Original Sin, which promises an “unflinching and explosive” accounting of Biden’s reelection campaign “despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.” There’s been a reckoning among past members of Biden’s inner circle, too. I recently sat down with Michael LaRosa, the former Biden official and longtime Jill Biden spokesperson, during a panel at American University’s Sine Institute, where I’m a fellow, to discuss the 2024 election and his unvarnished perspective on the Biden “cover-up,” such as it was. LaRosa, who left the White House in 2022, pushed back on that specific characterization, but acknowledged efforts to hide Biden from the media with remarkable candor—describing the president’s press team as essentially “gaslighting” the American public. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tara Palmeri: You worked so closely with the Biden family for years. I have to ask, do you think it’s accurate, as Original Sin states, that there were “desperate efforts to hide the extent of [Biden’s] deterioration” in 2024? Michael LaRosa: There are many things there that are true, in my view. Calling it a cover-up is a little harsh and exaggerated. Every politician, every human being, tries to cover up their age. We all wear makeup on TV. So we were always, from day one, cognizant that age was an issue. From the moment I joined the campaign in the fall of 2019, it was a problem. I was recently quoted in the lead of a Wall Street Journal piece by Annie Linskey—I love her, she’s a good reporter, though I felt a bit like my quote may have been misconstrued. The story began with me saying that I was asked to walk back my comment to a reporter for The Des Moines Register, who asked me to confirm the number of counties Jill Biden had visited. I had worked for her as her traveling press secretary, and the reporter was working on a profile of Jill. When I mentioned that conversation to her chief of staff [Anthony Bernal], he wasn’t happy, because they were hyperaware that if she’d been going to more counties than Biden had, that would provoke more discussion about his age. She looked like she had more stamina and like she was on a campaign.  Yes. And look, the spouse is the supporting actor. I was not thinking about the boys team. I was thinking about my job, which was to promote my boss. But I was still, at the time, learning that this is a supporting role. I’d worked for two senators, the speaker’s office, and a congresswoman. I was used to promoting everything the principal is doing. In this case, the principal was the spouse, who, by the way, will probably go down as one of the most influential first ladies we’ve ever had, because of the age thing. Well, that’s the story right now—that it was Jill running the ship. And that was the story with Ronald Reagan and F.D.R. There have always been stories that, with an aging president, the wife has to swoop in and do the job. Like when Dr. Jill Biden attended a cabinet meeting. She was there because she was speaking on behalf of her initiative, the health initiative. But you get the optics.  We were an integrated part of the West Wing, because we didn’t have our own agenda. We went and championed [Joe Biden’s] agenda all around the country. Unlike Hillary and other first ladies, the only issue Jill wanted to work on was giving credit to her husband. It’s a long way of answering your question, but “cover-up” is probably a little too harsh. Here’s another quote from the book: “Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an, at times, addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years.”  There are some things that are true, like the gaslighting. There was a lot of denial of the polling. All of the polling in the spring of 2023, and then the fall of 2023, showed that there was no real depth of support from his own party, let alone independents and Republicans. And Biden had been tied, or within the margin of error, with Trump—who had, by that point, how many court hearings? How many indictments? The fact that he was so close was always a problem, but they were kind of in denial. The message to everybody was to make sure you tell people, “It’s too early. These polls don’t mean anything.” Then for about a year and a half, the numbers never moved, and by denying the data that was out there publicly, by denying and undermining the really insightful journalism that The New York Times was doing, that you were doing, and all of the free press, they were actually demeaning a lot of those people. It was the data denial that really bothered me, because we loved polling when we were running right. We’re going to go on Howard Stern, [but] we’re not going to talk to The New York Times? They were doing that in spite. But what they didn’t understand, and what they still don’t get, is that it can’t be either-or. You can’t choose to alienate certain constituencies, and certain audiences, just for the sake of pandering to another. Anyway, the point is that they did do a lot of gaslighting. If you were watching MSNBC, you probably believed them. But if you were consuming information, consuming data, and looking at it objectively, and trying to interpret it and process it objectively, none of it was surprising.

Were you concerned about Biden running for reelection in 2024?  When I got to the White House, I was starry-eyed. I’d wanted to work in the White House since I was 5 years old, when I memorized the presidents from a place mat. And it was incredible to be there. I used to drive my boss home every night, my chief of staff, because we lived in the same building, and I remember him saying something about, “Well, that’s after the reelect. That’s a second term [issue].” I said, “Wait, what?” So you believed Biden when he said he would be a “bridge.” It wasn’t that I believed in “the bridge.” I just assumed—kind of like Barack Obama probably assumed. I figured that by 2024, this was going to be, “Okay, we’re going to pass the torch to another generation of Democrats, and let them handle a Trump 2.0 campaign.” But I was brought to reality pretty fast. Like, “Why not? Why wouldn’t he run?” They were kind of either stuck with him, or they were eating their vegetables and saying, “He’s our best shot. Not a socialist from Vermont. We’re comfortable with him, he’s competent, he’s earned a lot of goodwill.” Ultimately, the problem with deciding to run again was a misread of our mandate. When Biden was elected, we lost 13 House seats. Who was driving the reelect? Was it Jill or White House staffers who wanted to hold on to power?  Jill would be the first person in her convertible driving to the beach, and she’d never have a reason to come back to D.C. She wants only what he wants, and that’s how their lives have always been. But what really got under their skin was the media and other Democrats questioning whether he should run again. Every time there was a story about his age, or whether he could do another election, or whether he should be the candidate, they just doubled down. They felt, “We’ve proved everybody wrong in the past. Obama tried to push him out of the 2016 campaign—not once, but twice. Nobody thought we’d win the nomination. Nobody thought he could beat an incumbent.” To them, this was another example of everyone underestimating them. Keeping him away from the press was a way to cover up his condition. The president’s team was scared to death of impromptu, unscripted, unrehearsed, unpracticed, unchoreographed anything. They couldn’t compete in the attention economy. They didn’t have any idea how. And they didn’t have the vessel in Biden, who would have done anything. He loves TV. He loves doing stuff. It was the orbit that didn’t trust the candidate. Biden needed the press, but when he needed the press the most, they didn’t trust him. And then the press put their foot on the gas and never took it off, and he was politically dead in a month.

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