Jake Tapper, the lead Washington anchor for CNN, and Senior White House correspondent for ABC News before that, is a very well connected man in Washington media circles. He knows everybody who’s anybody, and everybody who’s anybody in DC knows him. With a guesstimated net worth of $20 million, he gets invited to all of the great parties.
Perhaps that $20 mil just isn’t enough for him, because any he’s been taking heroic measures to try to save his journalistic reputation. Too bad that no one with any sense, any sense at all, would believe that a journolist — and you can see the reason I spell it that way — as well connected as Mr Tapper was wholly unaware that President Joe Biden was slowly losing his marbles.
And here he goes again, this time in the pages of The New Yorker:
How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump
At a fateful event last summer, Barack Obama, George Clooney, and others were stunned by Biden’s weakness and confusion. Why did he and his advisers decide to conceal his condition from the public and campaign for reëlection?
by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson | Tuesday, May 13, 2025
President Joe Biden got out of bed the day after the 2024 election convinced that he had been wronged. The élites, the Democratic officials, the media, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama—they shouldn’t have pushed him out of the race. If he had stayed in, he would have beaten Donald Trump. That’s what the polls suggested, he would say again and again.
His pollsters told us that no such polls existed. There was no credible data, they said, to support the notion that he would have won. All unspun information suggested it would have been a loss, likely a spectacular one, far worse than that suffered by his replacement as the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The disconnect between Biden’s optimism and the unhappy reality of poll results was a constant throughout his Administration. Many insiders sensed that his inner circle shielded him from bad news. It’s also true that, for Biden to absorb those poll results, he would have had to face the biggest issue driving them: the public had concluded—long before most Democratic officials, media, and other “élites” had—that he was far too old to do the job.
Of course, there was the wicked former President Donald Trump, and a legion of evil, reich-wing conservatives all pointing out the President’s numerous gaffes, slip-ups, and dazed wandering off. While CNN and almost all of the credentialed media were firmly in Mr Biden’s corner, in the corner of anyone who could prevent Mr Trump’s election victory, wouldn’t an actual journalist of Mr Tapper5’s standing at least wonder about the videos and statements concerning the President’s mental status? Wouldn’t a real journalist at least consider investigating to see if there was anything to the stories? Chris Cillizza, late of CNN — he was laid off around Christmas of 2022 in a cost cutting move — tried to salvage his journalistic integrity with a YouTube apology for not pursuing that story aggressively enough, and letting White House aides, who had a vested interest in protecting Mr Biden, steer him away from such questions. Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal reminisced about First Lady Edith Wilson’s role shepherding President Woodrow Wilson’s last years in office following his 1919 stroke.
Messrs Tapper and Thompson again:
The real issue wasn’t his age, per se. It was the clear limitations of his abilities, which got worse throughout his Presidency. What the public saw of his functioning was concerning. What was going on in private was worse. While Biden on a day-in, day-out basis could certainly make decisions and assert wisdom and act as President, there were several significant issues that complicated his Presidency: a limit to the hours in which he could reliably function and an increasing number of moments when he seemed to freeze up, lose his train of thought, forget the names of top aides, or momentarily not remember friends he’d known for decades. Not to mention impairments to his ability to communicate—ones unrelated to his lifelong stutter.
The simple, “What the public saw of his functioning was concerning,” ought to have been enough for a real journalist, especially one with Mr Tapper’s connections, to at least think it worth investigating, and it tells us, as clearly as anything Mr Tapper would ever admit in public, that he knew that the President of the United States was seriously slipping.
The rest of the article tells us about what some of the high muckety-mucks got to see, and how worried they were at Mr Biden’s obvious decline, but this was all spring and summer of 2024 stuff, well after the President had decided to run again, well after he had secured the delegates for re-nomination, and well after anyone could seriously do anything about it.
In reality, it’s just a shill for the authors’ upcoming book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. I’m not willing to spend $16.99 for the Kindle edition, but I have to wonder: will the authors admit that they knew, personally knew, about Mr Biden’s decline early and kept it covered up?
The Amazon sales blurb includes:
Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, 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. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.
Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. 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. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.
“From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told.” Really? I notice that that list doesn’t include reporters, doesn’t include journalists! If all of those people knew about the President’s “condition and limitations,” how is it that journolists journalists, apparently not a single one of them, knew, or even had a clue?
Robert Stacy McCain likes to call the credentialed media “Democrats with bylines,” and Messrs Tapper and Thompson are setting about proving his point.
