CNN’s Jake Tapper Faces Backlash Over New Book ‘Exposing’ Coverup of Joe Biden’s Mental Decline By Debra Heine
A new book purporting to expose the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, co-authored by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, has conservative critics fuming with exasperation.
While Thompson was one of the few legacy media journalists who questioned Biden’s mental acuity well before his disastrous debate, Tapper ignored the elephant in the room for years, and even insisted in 2020 that Biden’s chronic incoherence was just a “stutter.”
The pair, according to CNN, was inspired to write “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” the day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election.
But even before the 2020 election, it was obvious that Biden was struggling cognitively on the campaign trail. It became clearer by the day post election, even as White House staffers limited and strictly choreographed his media appearances.
The media, including CNN, was largely complicit in the fraud throughout Biden’s term.
Now, CNN reports, the “deeply sourced” Tapper and Thompson can report that there was indeed a “cover-up” of Joe Biden’s “serious decline.”
The book’s publisher, Penguin Press, announced the book on Wednesday, saying: “What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents.”
Biden, “his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations,” the press release added.
Tapper had a unique vantage point as the co-moderator of the June 2024 CNN debate that led Biden to drop out of the presidential race a few weeks later.
Tapper and Thompson write in the book that “what the world saw at Joe Biden’s one and only debate was not an anomaly — it was not a cold, it was not someone who was under or overprepared, it was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose faculties had been diminishing for years.”
“Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify trying to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years,” the authors write. “What was the extent of it? Was it a cover-up? Was it a conspiracy? We will let the facts speak for themselves.”
Tapper claimed in a statement that “what inspired this book” was “we wanted to know more about what we all just lived through.”
A big part of “what we all just lived through,” of course, was a massive media gaslighting campaign to convince Americans they weren’t seeing what they were seeing. Leading that charge in 2020 was none other than Tapper himself.
During the heat of that election, the CNN anchor tried to shame then-Trump Campaign senior advisor Lara Trump for noticing that Biden was having trouble “get[ting] his words out” on the campaign trail.
“How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” he asked Lara Trump indignantly during a one-on-one interview.
Taken aback, Trump said that she had had no idea that Biden had ever suffered with a stutter, as it was something that had not been in evidence earlier in his political career.
“I think what we see on the stage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very clearly a cognitive decline,” she argued, adding that it was “uncomfortable” to watch. This should not have been a controversial take, as millions of Americans were seeing the same thing.
But Tapper angrily interjected: “I think you were mocking his stutter … I think you were mocking his stutter and you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
Talking over her, Tapper sneered “I would think that someone in Trump’s family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.”
Tapper said this because throughout Trump’s first presidency, the legacy media, including CNN, had frequently questioned Trump’s mental fitness for office.
Lara Trump would later say that the idea she would make fun of people with a stutter was “an atrocious accusation,” and that Tapper had “shut her down” because she had “tried to warn people of Joe Biden’s very obvious cognitive issues.”
Tapper’s tardy admission that Biden’s cognitive health was in “serious decline” all that time was too much for the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway to take.
“The mother bleeping AUDACITY of you to do this after running 24-7 interference on behalf of him and mocking and attacking every single person who noticed Biden’s decline,” Hemingway wrote on X. “The MOTHER. BUH-LEEP-ING. AUDACITY. Have you no decency? Have you NO shame?”
“Takes an amazing amount of hubris to spend five years ignoring Biden’s clear cognitive decline only to cash in on a book about it when he’s finally out of office,” said White House Rapid Responder Greg Price.
“Tapper could’ve outed the Biden mental incapacity cover-up at any time over the last four years,” the Federalist’s Sean Davis noted on X. “But he didn’t. He waited until Biden was gone before trying to get rich for disclosing facts he claimed were lies the whole time Biden was in office.”
Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins also weighed in on X, saying: “Amazing. When you call out Joe Biden’s decline for 3 years and say that he should step aside, you get called a conspiracy theorist. When a CNN reporter finally catches up with reality, they get to sell books and pretend like it never happened.”
In the book, Tapper and Thompson frame Biden’s decision to run for a second term as his “original sin,” which lead to Donald Trump’s unfortunate return to power.
“The irony is biting: In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat,” the publisher stated in the promotional material for the book. “The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence.
“Original Sin,” one of several upcoming books related to the 2024 election, is due out on May 20.
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