“Fools, said I, you do not know; silence like a cancer grows.” — “The Sound of Silence”

Yes, I have already read it. Every word.

The Kindle version hit my iPad at midnight, and I woke up around 1am wide fucking awake, which happens semi-often, and started reading, taking notes as I went, and then I spent an hour and a half writing this over breakfast and am proofreading it over lunch to publish in the early afternoon.1

Yes, I read it skeptically. And before I review the book, I will lay out my priors and biases. Most reviewers do that implicitly, or else weave them in throughout, but I’m going to do what I always do: name them, up front.2

My Priors and Biases

This is a controversial book about a controversial moment, so I’m going to be unusually thorough. You may end up disagreeing with me, but you’ll understand exactly how I got where I landed.

I think nobody hates journalists enough—including Jake Tapper. But I don’t have any particular animus toward him personally. Until quite recently, I got all my news from Twitter, so I genuinely wasn’t sure if Tapper was on CNN or MSNBC. And if you lined up ten white men whose faces appear regularly in political Twitter discourse, I might struggle to pick him out. Also, I have no idea who Alex Thompson is. Nor do I care.

One of my grandmothers experienced serious cognitive decline before she died. I was very close to her, and I witnessed that decline up close. In 2020, I believed I saw some of the early signs in Biden. But to be fair to the position Tapper lays out in this book, I was ambivalent. I thought I saw early signs, emphasis on “early”.

Yes, I was aware that if what seemed like early signs were making it into news coverage, it was probably worse, but I was agnostic about how bad.

So no, I didn’t see Biden as a husk of his former self in 2020 the way many people did—or now claim to have done.

To be fair about my own lens: on bad PTSD days, I can lose my train of thought, snap at people, and find it difficult to finish spoken sentences without anxiety taking over. Biden lost his wife and daughter decades ago, and then his son in 2015. Both of his surviving children have had difficulties severe enough to make the possibility of losing them, too, be plausible. So if he has some form of PTSD, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Americans rarely recognize masculine emotion as emotion, but I do. So when I saw flashes of fury from Biden that struck others as off-putting, I may have over-identified with him. I may have been too generous.

I also have an unusually strong personal bias about elder abuse. I’m aware that this isn’t a virtue on my part, but I would vote to legalize cruel and unusual punishment for child and elder abusers.

And I believe Joe Biden was a victim of elder abuse—on camera, and at scale. So I may let him off the hook too much and be too hard on his family and insiders.

I have another bias that affected how I read this book: I’m drawn to what I call “butterfly moments,” the idea that some small, chance event can change the entire trajectory of a life. It was a total fluke that I spent one day in 2015 looking for a therapist instead of doing something else—and now, literally everything about my life is different. There’s a similar moment, which I will write about one day, that caused me to believe I could successfully major in mathematics and move into the middle class.

I love moments like that — little moments after which nothing is the same. I think life is full of them, usually only seen in retrospect.

I think the debate was one of them. If Biden hadn’t debated—and debated badly—I don’t think he would have dropped out. And if he hadn’t dropped out, I think there’s a decent chance he would have won.

The AP VoteCast survey, along with several other survey organizations, tracks voter motivation—not just who people voted for, but why. Were they voting against the other guy, or for their own candidate? Biden had a 38-point advantage on that metric. Harris had just 23.

His exit reshaped the election from “we’d get change, but it would be a change back to a lot of chaos, drama, and having to think about the POTUS every single goddamn day” to “I can vote for a devil I’ve met before, and while it wasn’t necessarily fun to dance with that devil, at least my bank account looked better. Or I can vote for a devil that scares the living shit out of me in new ways.”

That may not have decided the election. We will never know for sure. But it mattered. The assassination attempt was a big deal, but Americans have very short attention spans.

The election was an electoral college landslide, but only 230,000 votes in three states would have swung it the other way. So how much it mattered is a highly debatable question. And the debate was the linchpin.

So I opened the book hoping—desperately—to find the butterfly moment.

Who decided he should debate? Who prepped him? Who said yes?

The Cancer Diagnosis

The news of Biden’s cancer diagnosis changed how I read the book in two ways.

First, prostate cancer doesn’t metastasize overnight. If it had already spread, then this wasn’t new. This wasn’t a 2025 problem. It was a years-long problem, hidden from the public. That means Biden wasn’t just being shielded from the truth. The country was. He wasn’t just deployed past his limits—he was cynically used.

So I read this book with a secondary lens, knowing it’s about covering up the decline of a man who will die soon. While I’m not sentimental about death, I am sentimental about old people. And the diagnosis made me angrier. It made the elder abuse feel even more grotesque. So yes—my sympathy for Biden himself may have grown.

Not as a leader. Not as a politician. I don’t give a rat’s ass about politicians. There are days when I struggle to care at all about politics, which amounts to whether the team of narcissists I mostly agree with is winning or losing the current shouting match against the team of narcissists I mostly disagree with. That Biden is on the latter team, instead of the former team, is not a matter of consequence to me, or at least it wasn’t with regard to reading the book.

But I may have had more sympathy for Biden as a very old man who, no matter what he did or failed to do when he was younger, should have been protected.

And wasn’t.

The Grand Narrative of Tapper’s Take

The book sets up a paradigm so emblematic of the entire debacle that I’m laughing—meanly—as I write this.

Either Tapper had no editor, or his editor hates him. Despises him. Wants-to-see-him-publicly-humiliated, friends-don’t-let-friends-go-camping-alone-with-that-guy, loathes him.

I say this because the Author’s Note lays out a grand narrative: people believed what they wanted to believe, with good intentions but disastrous results. They fooled themselves. They doubted their own judgment—reasoning that if things were truly that bad, surely someone else would have said something. Or done something. Tapper name-drops the usual themes—cognitive dissonance, groupthink, courage, cowardice, patriotism—and quotes Orwell:

“...we are capable of believing things which we know to be untrue... to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

And then, somehow, the note also includes this line:

“Readers who are convinced that Joe Biden was little more than a husk from the very beginning of his presidency, barely capable of stringing two sentences together, will not find support for that view here.”

Oh, but they will.

Because despite this framing, the book proceeds to build a striking, damning, and frankly overwhelming case for exactly and precisely that view.

What it reveals about Biden’s condition as far back as 2019 is so alarming that if I were a district attorney, I’d be filing elder abuse charges against nearly every named insider in this book who was close to him during the 2020 campaign.

And if I worked in the Trump administration, I’d be flipping through the U.S. Code looking for a statute that lets you charge campaign operatives with treason by omission. That’s how bad it is.

That Tapper frames his story so precisely opposite from the story he actually tells is…well, it’s oddly perfect. Not the word that first comes to mind, “glorious.” That word implies something good.

But it’s truly spectacular, in the way a building collapse is spectacular. The kind of spectacle you can't look away from because it reveals everything rotten in the structure.

The authors’ failure to recognize and respect the enormity of the story they’re telling removes what little charity I might have offered them—though in an ironic twist, that very failure is what made the story so convincing.

I came in skeptical. I read the book braced for spin. But the framing was so delusional, so fundamentally at odds with the facts being presented, that I ended up believing almost everything. Not because the authors were persuasive—they weren’t—but because they clearly didn’t realize just how damning their own reporting was.

They weren’t trying to sell a hit piece. They were trying to sell a tragedy with no villains.

Which only makes the villains easier to see.

This review is long and detailed. I did that partly so that anyone who wants to know what’s in it but doesn’t want to give Jake Tapper any money could just read my review.

But I also did it because the evidence for a vicious, ongoing crime committed against an elder in public is so massive and overwhelming.

That Tapper thinks his book tells a different story is a blessing.

It means he wasn’t lying to us—he was lying to himself. And that makes the book, ironically, more believable than if it had been written by someone with self-awareness and an agenda.

Journalists love to pretend they’re neutral arbiters. Most of the time, they’re just running interference for the powerful. But Tapper didn’t shape the narrative here. He framed it—and then filled it with evidence that obliterates his own frame.

He thought he was documenting a noble tragedy.

What he actually wrote was a damning case study in cowardice, delusion, and systemic abuse.

And because he doesn’t know that—that’s how you know it’s real.