CNN anchor Jake Tapper has admitted to falling short in his reporting on President Joe Biden’s cognitive abilities during his time in office.
The revelation came during a pointed interview with Megyn Kelly on her SiriusXM program, where Tapper was promoting his new book co-authored with Alex Thompson, exposing what many conservatives had long suspected about the former president’s mental fitness.
The book, titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” has sparked significant discussion about media coverage of Biden’s mental acuity during his presidency.
Tapper’s admissions during the Kelly interview were particularly striking given his position at a major news network that many conservatives had criticized for perceived bias in Biden’s favor.
“Knowing what I know now, obviously I feel tremendous humility about my coverage,” Tapper acknowledged to Kelly during their conversation.
Tapper conceded that “conservative media was correct” in their approach to reporting on Biden’s cognitive state.
Kelly didn’t hold back in her questioning, specifically referencing a 2022 interview Tapper conducted with Biden after an incident where the then-president had called out for a deceased colleague at an event.
She pressed Tapper on why he hadn’t confronted Biden more directly about potential cognitive issues during that interview opportunity, suggesting a failure to pursue an obvious story.
“There is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience and you didn’t do it,” Kelly stated plainly.
Tapper’s response was equally direct: “That’s correct. I didn’t. And like I said, I feel humility about my coverage.”
The interview took an even more revealing turn when Kelly brought up a contentious 2020 exchange between Tapper and Lara Trump, during which he had criticized her for mentioning Biden’s “cognitive decline.”
Looking back on that moment, Tapper admitted, “That Lara Trump interview, for example, she saw something that I did not see at the time, 100 percent, and I own that.”
While Tapper defended himself by noting he had asked Biden to be transparent about his health records in a 2020 interview, Kelly quickly pointed out that Biden never followed through on that promise of transparency.
“No, he wasn’t transparent at all,” Tapper acknowledged.
Kelly further pressed Tapper about a missed opportunity during an October 2022 interview with Biden.
“You didn’t follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs, that he was losing his train of thought regularly. That he was slurring, that he was incomprehensible, that he was getting lost on the White House lawn,” she said, listing incidents that had raised red flags for many observers.
Tapper’s response was simple: “That’s true.”
“There should be a lot of soul-searching not just among me but among the legacy media to begin with – all of us – for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently,” he reflected.
He went on to state, “Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, ‘We were hip to this and the legacy media was not.'”
When Kelly suggested that Tapper and other mainstream reporters had engaged in “willful blindness” regarding Biden’s condition, Tapper called it a “tough and fair question” before discussing his book’s reporting process.
Democratic insiders had justified their misrepresentations of Biden’s condition by citing what they perceived as the “existential threat” posed by Donald Trump, according to Tapper.
Once the election concluded with Trump’s victory, these sources became “remarkably willing to talk” about what they had observed regarding Biden’s mental state.
“And they justified to themselves what they had done in terms of misrepresenting how the president was not just to me and Alex and other reporters, but also just to each other and to the world and to Democrats and to the cabinet by saying that there was this existential threat of Donald Trump and only Joe Biden could beat him,” Tapper explained.
The interview also touched on specific factors that may have affected Biden’s cognitive condition.
Tapper revealed that some sources indicated the collapse of a plea deal for Biden’s son Hunter over gun charges in 2023 had significantly worsened the elder Biden’s mental state, providing insight into personal factors that might have accelerated his decline while in office.
Kelly remained skeptical throughout the exchange, directly challenging Tapper’s self-defense.
“Time and time again, when issues came up, you seemed to be running cover for the president. You didn’t seem interested,” she stated.
On Sunday, Biden announced that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, adding another layer to discussions about his health during his time in office.
This revelation comes months after Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race amid growing concerns about his fitness to serve.
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