Month: May 2025

For Harvard students, this year’s graduation ceremony comes amid an intense standoff between one of America’s most prestigious universities and the United States government.

Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The Times, explains how the conflict escalated and what it reveals about how far the administration will go to fulfill its agenda.

Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, covering Washington.

Background reading: 

• Harvard leaders see only bad outcomes ahead as they battle President Trump.
• The Trump administration says it is halting Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Photo: Sophie Park/Bloomberg

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In 2023 and 2024, there were many things that were unsayable. Perhaps the most unsayable—at least in legacy media circles—was that the President of the United States was not capable of being president, because he was no longer mentally fit.

Those people who did break the taboo—who dared to notice Biden’s countless gaffes, his stiff gait, those who recognized the reality of old age, including Special Counsel Robert Hur—were written off or smeared. Videos of the president—clips of Biden tripping or misspeaking—were rebranded by The New York Times as “cheap fakes.” People were told to disbelieve their eyes and ears.

It’s now the spring of 2025. Trump is the president. Biden dropped out. And now the unsayable things are being said—most dramatically in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

Tapper, of CNN, and Thompson, of Axios, interviewed more than 200 people for this book, which illuminates Biden’s mental decline, his enablers, and how the country was effectively run by committee in the midst of his clear cognitive impairment.

For those of us who thought it was bad—it was actually much worse than anyone could have imagined.

Alex and Jake have chosen to call the effort to hide Biden’s decline a “cover-up.” Those are choice words from two mainstream media insiders, invoking memories of Watergate and Iran-Contra. And the cover-up they are referring to is that of the Biden family and the close circle of advisers around them, many of whom are still delusional about Biden’s state.

But cover-up might be the word that many Americans would use to describe the press’s coverage of Biden. How did ordinary people see more than people with White House press passes? And, what does it all say about human nature, transparency, and groupthink?

This is a really illuminating conversation about presidential power, the lengths some will go to keep it, and how the media failed to report the story of a lifetime.

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