Books are already coming out dealing with the 2024 campaign for president. All of them examine the mental decline of Joe Biden during his presidency. Next month comes one that puts that decline front and center, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.

As early as 2021 Mr. Biden had trouble putting names to well-known faces. He would ramble off topic during meetings with lawmakers. During preparations for the June 27 debate with President Trump — the event that made Mr. Biden’s unfitness for the presidency obvious — Mr. Biden just got up from the table one afternoon, went out to the pool, and fell asleep on a chaise-longue.

And yet, until the debate, both Biden administration officials and the liberal press vehemently denied that there was anything to be concerned about. 

All this was a grave dereliction of the duty that is owed by both officials and journalists to the American sovereign. In the United States, sovereignty is held by the people, who elect a government and have every right to be kept fully and accurately informed as to its affairs.

That reflects the design by the Framers of America’s constitutional presidency. The accountability of the American president to the people — who are the sovereign in the Framers’ system — was meant to prevent the pitfalls of tyrannical behavior by a sovereign monarch, as often plagued the Mother Country.

The most politically powerful of these monarchs was Henry VIII, who during the Tudor era held sovereignty over England. The drama and turmoil of his rule is currently back in the spotlight via the PBS historical series “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,” based on Hillary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell.

How would a campaign of deception like the kind apparently practiced by Mr. Biden’s aides have played out early in Henry’s reign? At that time the young king was much more interested in hunting and wenching than in dealing with the day-to-day affairs of his government. These he left to the lord chancellor whom he appointed and trusted.

Imagine, say, that the lord chancellor was becoming senile and ever more easily manipulated and misled by those around him. Yet instead of informing the king, the members of the court conspired to keep this information from him in order to ensure their own continued grip on power.

Of course, knowledge of the lord chancellor’s condition would, inevitably, reach the king. When it did, what would Henry VIII have done? Everyone knows the answer to that question. Keeping information vital to the welfare of the realm from the sovereign was treason.

There would have been heads on pikes displayed on London Bridge, starting with the lord chancellor’s. While punishments have changed, the lust for power has not. That has motivated Washington insiders to work hard to keep knowledge of the president’s conditions away from the American sovereign, the people.

And, to be sure, the crime of treason in this country is precisely and very narrowly defined in the Constitution. “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” says Article II, section 3. Plus, too, a treason conviction requires the “testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act.”

There are vast differences, to be sure, between a single man who was both the sovereign and head of government, and a sovereign body of 340 million people that elects a government — a testament to the Framers’ constitutional design. 

Yet if conspiring to hide Mr. Biden’s mental decline and lying about information for political purposes, is not treason — and it is not — then what is it? To adapt a phrase coined by William James a century ago, it is, perhaps, the moral equivalent of treason and should be so regarded by the sovereign American  people.