Obscuring the decline of a President

WHEN JOE BIDEN REVEALED HIS PROSTATE-CANCER diagnosis on May 18, the news entered a conversation Washington was already having.

- - BY PHILIP ELLIOTT

President Joe Biden at a briefing on Hurricane Milton on Oct. 9, 2024

Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists Alex Thompson of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN, reported that Biden forgot top White House aides' names, occasionally resorting to short-hand descriptions of roles like “Press” for his longtime communications chief; that there were discussions of his possibly needing a wheelchair in a second term; that he sometimes ate dinner as early as 4:30 p.m. The book says Biden seemed completely unfazed by a jarring debate performance that sent the Democrats into a spiral and put donations on ice. At a Hollywood fundraiser for his crumbling re-election campaign, he blanked when face to face with George Clooney.

TIME sat down with Thompson, before the diagnosis was made public.