If only CNN’s Jake Tapper – and so many others in his line of work – could go back in time.
Tapper became the subject of conservative scorn this week after announcing that he and ace Axios reporter Alex Thompson had authored a new book about the collapse of former president Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
According to publisher Penguin Random House, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Coverup, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again tells the story of how Biden, “his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat [Donald] Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations”. But “the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world” last June at a debate moderated by none other than Tapper.
It’s a worthy subject; and there’s no one better to write about it than Thompson, who doggedly reported on Biden’s condition for years. Tapper, however, is another matter.
A clip of the CNN anchor has resurfaced, in which he lectures Lara Trump back in 2020 for associating Biden’s “stutter” with “cognitive decline”. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” he asked her at the time. Biden had already insisted that his gaffes had nothing to do with his childhood stutter. But Tapper appeared determined to reach for any excuse to explain away Biden’s behaviour.
To be fair to the face of the Left-leaning cable news network, Biden’s condition seemed to deteriorate considerably between 2020 and 2024, even if the signs of what was to come were there early on. But Tapper persisted in peddling soft defences of the former president even when his cognitive decline became impossible to ignore.
After Special Counsel Robert Hur revealed that Biden could no longer recall major events from his time as vice-president, or remember the year in which his son Beau died, Tapper continued to cite Biden’s “stutter” during discussions of his age, and even suggested that the stunning memory lapses were not “disqualifying” during an interview with Democratic congressman Adam Schiff.
Still, for all of his shortcomings, Tapper was tougher on Biden than most of his peers, digging into the issue repeatedly on his show. The more alarming aspect to this story is that swathes of the US media are still refusing to acknowledge their complicity in covering up the truth about Biden’s fitness to serve.
Biden’s decline was not rank, partisan speculation. It was observable, readily apparent fact. But most of America’s Fourth Estate – just 3.4 per cent of whom identify as Republicans, according to a study in 2023 – denied that fact presumably because it was an inconvenient one that imperilled Biden’s chances of defeating Trump again.
“In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy,” begins the publisher’s description of Original Sin. The tragedy of much of the US media was not just its transparent willingness to collude in a cover-up designed to protect Biden’s re-election chances, but its continued, shameful refusal to avoid a reckoning for that cover-up. It was only when it became clear that he would lose to Trump that they sprung into action with all the zeal of a convert.
Thompson and Tapper’s work will doubtlessly yield invaluable information about the inner workings of the plot to secure a second term for a man incapable of serving one. But it also ought to account for the brazen role journalists played in it until the moment they realised it wouldn’t work.
Isaac Schorr
Telegraph Media Group