Before the Puppet Show

the real original sin

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This is a follow-up to my recent review of Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin.

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On May 20 — the day it was released (hooray for Kindle versions that hit devices at midnight) — I read and reviewed Jake Tapper’s new book about the cover-up of Biden’s physical and mental decline, Original Sin.¹ The book, the events it covers, the review itself, and reader responses to it have made it hard for me to think about anything else since I read it.²

This post is a synthesis of what I think those events actually mean, and what they reveal about us, our politics, and the country we live in.

The review was already long and written in haste, so I deliberately left out two important points that would have made it even longer. I chose to focus on Biden’s mental decline, since that’s the most urgent and alarming concern in a president. But the book also repeatedly documents his physical deterioration. Insiders describe being shocked by his stooped posture, shuffling gait, weak handshake, and overall frailty. More than once, someone who hadn’t seen him in a month or two describes being startled by how much he had declined in that short time.

And I didn’t say much about the “we have to protect the country from Trump” justification. It’s there, mentioned several times throughout the book.

But because Tapper is so convinced by his own narrative, he frames the story as if Biden’s insiders weren’t lying — just deluded.

That’s not how I read it.

The “anything is better than Trump” logic shows up more than once, explicitly, and often implicitly. Sometimes it’s framed as “even if he’s not the man he used to be,” other times as “if he doesn’t run, it’ll be Harris — and can she beat Trump?” Either way, the justification is clear: lying to keep this tragically diminished man in office is fine, because Trump is worse.

I didn’t go deep into that angle in the review, because I wanted to focus on the reporting — what the book actually revealed about the cover-up, and how starkly it contradicted Tapper’s framing.

But it seems obvious to me that the people who participated in the cover-up — which includes most of the Democratic insiders, White House staffers, and cabinet members — knew what they were doing. They weren’t confused. They thought the cover-up was necessary. That it was noble.

Because they were saving the country. From Trump.

I’ve been turning that second point over all week. Trying to understand it. Synthesize it. Wrap my head around it.

What follows isn’t quite a unified theory — but it’s something adjacent to one.

Impetus: The Mouth That Wouldn’t Close

In reflecting on Original Sin, the moment that crystallized everything for me — the moment that exposed just how morally bankrupt the whole charade was — came during the section on debate prep.

Debate prep for a presidential candidate isn’t a small, quiet affair. It involves a swarm of people, many of whom aren’t in the candidate’s daily orbit. There are rehearsals with fake moderators and a staffer standing in as the opponent. There’s makeup, lighting, posture coaching. There’s someone screen-testing wardrobe. There are consultants sitting in the mock audience, watching, taking notes, flagging every moment that needs polish.

According to the book, Steven Spielberg even video-called in — lending his expertise as a director to help the President of the United States appear human.

The account is shocking. Biden took regular naps. His answers were rambling and incoherent. He had to be reminded — repeatedly — to close his mouth.

Really sit with that.

This is a man who spent fifty years in public life, gave more interviews and speeches than most politicians alive — and had to be told, like a confused nursing home patient, to close his mouth.

More than once.

I’m not a particularly courageous person. I can admit that. I live alone, I’m deaf, and I have no family — so yes, there are things I haven’t said out loud because I worry, rationally or not, about the consequences. That calculus hits different when you literally wouldn’t hear a bad guy coming.

And yet, when I take a deep breath and acknowledge an ugly truth? Those are excuses, not explanations. I could be braver. I should be. I’m working on it.

But when I imagine myself in that room — realistically, maybe I was there because they were testing some real-time captioning tech and needed a deaf tester, something accessibility-minded staff might actually think to include — I think I know what I would’ve done.

First, I would’ve tried to meet with my Representative. If I couldn’t get a quick meeting, or if I saw her and felt like she wasn’t going to do anything, I would’ve found a journalist — someone with access to the White House, who I felt I could trust to protect me as a source — and really pushed them to go figure out what the fuck was going on and report on it.

And if the first journalist didn’t act? I’d find another. And another.

Because a president who is non compos mentis is a constitutional emergency. And if you’re helping prep him for a live televised debate and he has to be reminded — not once, but repeatedly — to close his mouth?

You know.

You know he’s not fit for office.

That no one leaked — that no one even quietly or anonymously flagged what was happening — is what finally convinced me that I had it right and Tapper had it wrong.

This wasn’t delusion.

It was collusion. Conscious, deliberate collusion.

They knew. Even if some had fooled themselves up to that point, the illusion ended the moment someone had to say, “Mr. President, please sir, remember that when you aren’t speaking, you need to close your mouth.”

That’s the functional equivalent of saying to a pilot, as passengers board, “Sir, you need to stop trying to fly with the tray table.”

It’s the kind of instruction that proves the man in charge isn’t in control. That he can’t be.

And still, no one did anything.

That’s when I realized: this wasn’t just fear. This wasn’t denial. This was about Trump.

It had to be. There had to be some powerful, urgent-feeling reason for a room full of people — dozens of them — to witness that, and say nothing.

And “we have to stop Trump” is the only motive even hinted at in the book.

It’s the only hypothesis that fits. And it’s what made me think and write until I had my not-quite-unified theory of what was going on.

Priors and Biases About Trump

Just as I’ve been called both a raging feminazi and a pick-me with internalized misogyny—for the same damn essay—any time I write about Trump, the reaction is predictably chaotic. The exact same words get me accused of being a MAGA cultist and of having TDS. That’s because the two deranged ends of the Trump opinion spectrum—the worshipful “God Emperor” crowd and the “Orange Hitler” alarmists—are filled with people fundamentally incapable of reading anyone else’s words through a lens other than their own.

But it matters, so here’s where I stand.

My personal opinion of Trump as a man is strongly negative. His behavior doesn’t reflect the values I’d want to instill in a son or seek in a partner. I find him impulsive, undisciplined, egocentric, and often cruel—sometimes, disappointingly, over matters so petty that even a mature teenager could let them go.

That said, I do believe the assassination attempt led to some genuine moral growth—visible in his demeanor, rhetoric, and comparative restraint since the shooting. And regardless of how one feels about Trump politically, moral growth in a major national figure is a good thing for the country.

My view of him as a President is mildly positive. I disagree with some of his policies, and even when I agree, I often dislike how he implements them. But like the majority of Americans who voted for him, I see his flaws and simply recognize that—especially by 2024—the alternative was much worse.

A Not-Quite Unified Theory: History

I’m going to use the term TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome—to describe both the kind of intense hatred and fear of a second Trump term that I believe drove the Biden cover-up, and more broadly, the defining emotional logic of left-leaning American life for the better part of a decade.

Yes, it’s a meme. Yes, it’s a cliché. But I need a shorthand—and this one fits.

TDS is undeniably the unifying principle of the Democratic Party these days—like a dog pissing on a tree, it's less about meaning and more about making sure everyone knows which pack you run with.

So how did we get here?

Before Trump entered politics, he was a cultural fixture—gaudy, ridiculous, sometimes charismatic, always self-promoting. He was the guy that many people loved and everyone else loved to hate. He made cameos in movies like Home Alone 2, hosted The Apprentice, sold steaks, peddled vodka, plastered his name on everything from buildings to bottled water.

He wasn’t widely respected, exactly, but he was entertaining. The pre-2015 version of Trump was seen as a punchline, not a threat. Even his critics treated him like a pro wrestling villain—serving up exaggerated disgust as part of the act.

He was tacky, narcissistic, and deeply unserious—but in a way that made him a reliable late-night comedy target, not a monster. This is crucial to understanding what happened next.

Because when he suddenly wasn’t a joke anymore—when he was a serious candidate, and then an actual President—it broke something. The shift from reality-TV clown to leader of the free world happened so fast—and so awkwardly, surprising almost everyone—that many people never reconciled it.

The brain that had laughed at him couldn’t adapt to fearing him without spiraling into panic or projection.

So they didn’t. But worse, they didn’t even try. Many didn’t even ever seem to register the need to try.

They fused the two—clown and tyrant, joke and Hitler—into one grotesque figure.

The emotional dissonance didn’t resolve. It calcified into pathology.

When Trump first ran for President in 2016, a certain level of apprehension was entirely reasonable. He presented, over and over again, as volatile, grandiose, and potentially reckless. I’m not talking about the tweets or the tacky gold-plated persona. Reasonable people can disagree about whether crude speech matters.

But what did matter—and made the anxiety justifiable—were things like:

• He’d be “the most militaristic person ever,” in the same breath he used to brag about real estate deals. (Ironically, this wasn’t even close to true, compared to other GOP candidates.) Source.

• He saw no issue with using nuclear weapons in Europe if necessary, asking repeatedly, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” (While the campaign denied that he said it in the way he was quoted, he said very similar things in public enough times to make the quote believable.) Source.

• He said he’d give the U.S. military illegal orders — like killing the families of terrorists. Source.

• He wanted to “renegotiate” U.S. national debt as if we were a distressed casino, with no visible grasp of the global financial consequences. Source.

At the same time, many of the fears were cartoonishly disconnected from reality. I remember hearing—repeatedly, in 2016—that Trump would start conversion camps for gay people. That he would ban women from voting. That he would suspend elections. That he’d call for the death penalty for women who got abortions. That he might cancel the Constitution entirely.

I was afraid of him, too. Deeply and genuinely afraid. But my fears ran more towards chaos and consequential mistakes born of his ignorance, as well as the possibility of unnecessary war because someone had offended him.

And even then, I thought most of those claims, especially the ones about gay people and abortion, were absurd. Whatever else he was, Trump was a thrice-married, Playboy-interviewed, casino-owning New Yorker. I remember taking a break from studying for my first Calculus 1 exam, in October 2016, and doing a bit of research on the end of his first marriage.

And I remember having this thought: “There’s so much real stuff to be scared of here. Why are they scared that someone who’s probably paid for enough abortions to fill up a fucking kindergarten is going to make it a death penalty offense? For fuck’s sake.”

He was never going to impose theocratic morality by force.

So, even in 2016, we were dealing with two separate realities: one in which Trump was a deeply unconventional, unserious candidate with worrying blind spots—and another in which he was the second coming of Hitler, minus the subtlety.

Then he became President. And for four years, while you may have hated his policies, or his personality, or the chaos he caused, none of the worst fears came true. There were zero gay concentration camps. No dictatorship. No permanent power grabs. No journalists imprisoned. No secret police squads rounding up protesters.

There’s a reason he got over 11 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016: a lot of people who sat out or voted against him the first time saw what actually happened—and recalibrated.

Perhaps the most astute statement ever made about Trump is this:

His supporters take him seriously but not literally. His critics take him literally but not seriously.

This observation isn’t just clever—it’s a diagnostic key.

TDS as Interpretive Breakdown

At its core, Trump Derangement Syndrome is a failure of interpretation. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean literally: a systemic failure, often a refusal, to parse context, subtext, motive, and rhetorical style.

It’s the refusal to distinguish between:

• narcissistic hyperbole vs calculated deception,

• salesmanship vs literal policy proposals,

• provocations meant to troll the media vs actual plans for governance.

That refusal takes different forms. For some, it’s righteous absolutism: “The truth matters! Words matter!” So they treat everything he says with the solemnity of sacred text—usually to prove he’s a dictator.

For others, it’s a deep-seated trauma response: they find him so emotionally disturbing that they can’t grant any nuance without feeling complicit.

And for others still, it’s just political expedience: treating Trump like a monster is useful for votes, funding, and social cohesion inside elite left spaces. At this point, it’s simply how they confirm their own virtue: they hate Trump.

Whatever the cause, the effect is the same: every single Trump utterance is read as a Big Lie. There’s no room for category one (narcissistic puffery) or category two (blustery showmanship). Everything becomes category three: deliberate, dangerous deception. And once you’re in that mindset, every sentence is a threat.

Every joke is a dog whistle.

Every verbal tic is a roadmap to tyranny.

What makes this so exhausting—especially for the rest of us—is that Trump, a politician, does in fact tell lies. But his lies are mixed in with bullshit, exaggeration, trolling, self-mythology, and spontaneous chaos. It is, at times, maddening.

But it’s hardly unique in human communication.

What is unique is the scale and intensity of the refusal to interpret.

Yes, it’s frustrating. Yes, it would be better if he spoke like a serious, sober, erudite, mature statesman. But he doesn’t, and pretending he does—or demanding that he must before you are willing to engage with reality—is childish in the extreme.

You don’t have to like it. I don’t.

But you do have a moral responsibility to interpret it like an adult.

So yes, Trump’s a chaotic communicator with no filter, no discipline, and a constant need to dominate the narrative. That’s real. But TDS happens when people stop seeing that as a trait and start seeing it as a threat to all human decency. When they don’t just disagree with him—they see him as ontologically evil.

Once that’s your lens, any tactic feels justified. Including lying to the public. Including abusing a frail old man for four years.

Because if you’ve convinced yourself you’re fighting literal evil — an existential threat, or an “asteroid headed to earth,” to borrow Sam Harris’s phrasing — anything short of total war feels like both complicity and cowardice.

TDS and the Biden Cover-Up

What strikes me most about the strain of TDS behind the Biden cover-up is this: Trump had already served a full term.

I would still believe it was wrong to lie, to cover up Biden’s condition, to drag a cognitively failing man through the motions of power — but I would have more sympathy if this had happened before Trump’s first term.

Before there was any empirical reality to measure him against.

In 2016, people didn’t know what a Trump presidency would be. They were filling in the blanks with whatever scared them most. Some feared fascism, others feared nuclear war. Some thought he would jail political opponents, end freedom of the press, or install a theocracy. The anxiety, though often histrionic, was at least rooted in genuine uncertainty.

But after four years in office, the unknown was known. And for all his chaos, Trump didn’t become a dictator. He didn’t suspend the Constitution. He didn’t ban elections, criminalize dissent, or invade another country. He did not, in other words, become the thing people were so sure he would be.

And that should have mattered.

And to spare myself the predictable screeching: January 6 was many things — a riot, a security failure, a symbolic desecration of a democratic ritual — and both the seriousness and Trump’s responsibility for each of those is debatable.

But it was never a real threat to the actual transfer of power.

The military wasn’t switching sides.

The courts weren’t reversing course.

Power in the United States of America doesn’t operate on Capture the Flag rules.

Neither stealing Pelosi’s podium nor wearing a horned headdress — nor zip ties, nor shouting, nor chaos — was ever going to make anyone but Joe Biden the next President.

The fact that Trump served four years and none of the worst predictions came true should have, at minimum, recalibrated the moral math.

It should have changed the calculus about what level of distortion, manipulation, and institutional betrayal was justified in order to stop him. Because once you've seen the man in power and he wasn’t what you feared—yet you still commit to deception, still push a candidate you know isn’t mentally fit—then it’s not about Trump anymore.

It’s about something else.

At that point, TDS stops being a reaction to Trump’s behavior and becomes a justification for your own.

It becomes a handy excuse to do what you'd otherwise condemn. Because you’ve convinced yourself the alternative is unthinkable.

Because the bad man might come back.

And this time, maybe he really will do all the things he didn’t do before. That’s the logic. That’s the fear loop. The camps he never built? He’ll build them. The Constitution he didn’t suspend? He’ll shred it. The press he didn’t jail? He’ll silence them. The gay rights he left intact? Gone. The peaceful transition he actually oversaw? Forget it. This time, they say, will be different.

This time, the nightmare has to come true. Because they need it to.

Without that belief, everything they did — every lie, every cover-up, every violation of democratic norms they claimed to be defending — becomes inexcusable.

So they cling to the fantasy. Not because it’s likely. But because it’s useful.

And so, the cover-up wasn’t born of delusion. It wasn’t a tragic accident. It was a strategic decision, built on a mutated strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome so deep that it survived contact with reality — and decided to lie anyway.

The Lesson to Integrate

Here’s what I’ve learned from all this — from reading the book, writing the review, watching the collapse, and watching the people who didn’t make the transition I did: cognitive flexibility is everything; the difference between collapse and recalibration.

Adaptability.

Change.

Responsibility.

If someone you despise is President of the United States and you can’t adapt to his rhetorical style — even if it’s gross, even if you shouldn’t have to — then you’ve chosen misery.

That’s not on him. That’s on you.

If you still can’t adapt — can’t stomach the earthiness and vulgarity of a president whose style is more carnival barker than statesman — you’ll eventually need an emotional workaround.

You’ll need to invent reasons why your outrage is not only justified, but morally essential.

And that’s how people end up truly convincing themselves that a thrice-married, Playboy-interviewed, gold-plated New York hedonist — whose aesthetic tastes scream curated by a committee of flaming queens with a rhinestone quota — is secretly building conversion camps for homosexuals.

That’s how they end up believing a man with all the message discipline of a raccoon on Adderall is just one bad week away from launching a thousand-year Reich.

If you can’t adapt to the world as it is, even when it sucks, you will reshape the world, in your mind, into something it isn’t.

And once you’ve done that — once you’ve trained your nervous system to respond to a trolling, narcissistic blowhard like he’s a Bond villain — then you’ll be willing to justify anything to stop him.

Even elder abuse.

Even a multi-year cover-up that crossed the line into treason.

Even a slow-motion coup, where unelected staff quietly assumed the duties of a President incapable of doing the job.

Even the slow, public humiliation of a frail old man, paraded around as if he’s still in charge.

That’s the lesson.

Not just about Trump.

About us. About what fear does when you don’t check it.

About what self-righteousness gives you permission to excuse.

About how the refusal to adapt doesn’t just cloud your judgment.

It corrupts your soul.

And once you cross that line, you don’t just lose clarity.

You stop wanting it.

And that’s the real original sin: not the lie they told the country, but the one they told themselves.

The lie they came to love.

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1. I paywalled the review, in part, because I hadn’t put out much paid-only content lately, and this felt like a substantial enough topic to make up for it. My paid subscriptions go directly toward reducing my student loan balance (on pace to be paid off entirely in 23 months!), and I take that support seriously. I’m incredibly grateful to those of you who subscribe, and for the freedom your generosity is helping make possible.

2. Quite a few people upgraded to read all of it, which is gratifying and humbling. I hope y’all will stick around! Coming soon: my new reading project — working through a biography of each U.S. president, in order, as an anchor for studying American history — will be paywalled too. I picked a 900-page George Washington bio to start, so it’s a long slog, but I’m enjoying it, and I think the series will be worth the effort.