CNN’s Jake Tapper Is Selling A Book on Biden’s Dementia Cover-up …. But Nobody Forgets Tapper’s Cover-up Complicity

After ignoring and helping conceal Biden’s dementia, how can liberal media regain public trust?

7 minute read

CNN’s Jake Tapper is now making the media rounds selling a book with exclusive, blockbuster, insider information about a cover-up never before disclosed: Joe Biden suffered from dementia. Whoa! Who knew? Except anyone with ears, eyes, and a functioning central nervous system.

The Jake Tapper book tour is the latest example of journalists screwing up because personal politics blinds them from facts and reality, and then trying to pretend that they weren’t blinded by personal politics from facts and reality. It’s also why I caution readers to read widely and read wisely. If a topic is important to you, spend some time looking for different sources to get informed. The media is fragmented today, and much of what you read in legacy outlets is driven by narratives that always seem to massage elites’ liberal sensibilities.

Hitting bookshelves and flacked relentlessly on CNN, excerpts and snippets are now tearing across the internet from Tapper’s latest tome “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” (Sorry, but I’m not linking to this nonsense.)

Tapper’s thesis is that “Democrats lied to the public about Biden’s mental decline.” Well, duh. Anyone with two neurons squirelling around inside their brain bucket, and who watched the Biden/Trump debate last June, figured out that we were being lied to. What Americans need to know, though, is who lied to us.

Surprise! Some of the people who lied to us were Jake Tapper and CNN.

Clips of Tapper attacking Lara Trump for bringing up Biden’s mental decline and Tapper dismissing Biden’s many documented verbal fumbles as a “stutter,” began circulating on X, shortly after the book launch.

“He’s sharp mentally, I think the question is physically, right?” Tapper charged, in a leading question during one CNN interview.

“The Russians are trying to do … to make us and the public not trust our election integrity, Joe Biden has dementia, and all this stuff,” Tapper said, during another CNN segment.

Here’s the clips.

When Tapper went on Megyn Kelly to flack his book, Kelly lambasted him for his past defense of Biden. “You seemed to be running cover for the President,” Kelly stated.

After playing a clip of Tapper’s attack on Lara Trump for bringing up Biden’s dementia, Kelly forced an apology from him. Kelly can be seen grinning during the exchange.

Tapper’s complicity burbled up later in this headline on the satirical website Babylon Bee: “Jake Tapper Uncovers Startling Evidence That Biden’s Decline Was Covered Up By Jake Tapper.”

But placing sole blame on Tapper isn’t fair, because he was aided in Biden’s defense by a host of other reporters such as former CNN journalists John Harwood and Chris Cilliza, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent, columnist Matt Yglesias, former NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, Washington Post columnists E.J. Dionne and Jennifer Rubin, journalism professor Jay Rosen, pretty much everyone at MSNBC, and ….. Well, you get the picture, right?

Even the medical community pitched in.

After Biden’s disastrous debate last summer, Tony Fauci hopped on CBS News to endorse the President. “Looked like a bad night,” Fauci said to CBS. Cautioning against speculation on Biden’s mental acuity, Fauci then speculated that Biden may have been suffering side effects from a cold medication.

“Did he have a bad cold?” Fauci asked for no apparent reason. “Did he take an antihistamine to make him groggy? We don’t know what went on, and I think it would be unfair and inappropriate to try and diagnose something from just a 90-minute clip.”

Echoing Fauci, two Yale faculty members published an essay in Newsweek also asking the public to ignore what their own eyes witnessed during the debate. Instead of demanding to know if Biden was suffering from dementia, these professors demanded to know if Biden was using cold meds.

“It would be a tragedy to magnify the meaning of an ill-timed adverse drug effect—and potentially have it change the course of history.”

The Yale profs’ essay on Biden’s speculative use of cold meds was apparently so insightful and compelling that MedPage Today then republished it.

Tapper’s media campaign to promote his book on a Biden cover-up, that ignored Tapper’s own duplicity in a Biden cover-up, caught the attention of comedian Jon Stewart who jabbed CNN for failing to report on Biden’s mental decline and then hawking Tapper’s book relentlessly on CNN.

“Don’t news people,” Stewart asked to giggles from the audience, “have to tell you what they know …. when they find it out? Isn’t that the different between news, and a secret?”

The Biden dementia cover-up won’t change the careers of any reporter who aided the Biden White House, because whenever the media gets caught lying to the public, those reporters just keep on moving on. For those interested in further details, see below.

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One critical point: back in February 2024, the Justice Department released Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents. In the report, Hur concluded that he couldn’t charge the President because he was an “elderly man with a poor memory” who showed “diminished faculties and faulty memory” in interviews.

Former CNN reporter John Harwood then attack Hur on X.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman also went after Hur in the pages of the New York Times.

As did Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post. For good measure, Rubin accused some reporters of “complicity” for reporting that Hur found Biden had a poor memory.

Andrew Prokop at the liberal media outlet Vox, also joined the Biden defense, claiming, without any evidence, that Hur exaggerated Biden’s memory problems.

And let’s not forget liberal pundit Matt Yglesias.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent accused the media of a “meltdown” over the Hur report. Post columnist EJ Dionne then promoted Sargent’s claims to readers on X.

Shortly before the presidential debate last June, MSNBC ran a segment castigating conservative Sinclair broadcasting for running news clips on local stations that emphasized Biden’s age and poor memory. According to MSNBC, the problem was that Trump was the one suffering from poor memory, not Biden.

To emphasize this point, MSNBC platformed Angelo Carusone of Media Matters for America. Founded in 2004 by Democratic Party operative David Brock, Media Matters served as part of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election “outrage machine,” The New York Times reported.

“You would not see as much hammering in mainstream media and mainstream reporting about the discrepancy between Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s mental acuity once someone saw what the current state of Donald Trump really is,” Carusone claimed. “That debate could be a real pivot point.”

Of course, we all then saw what happened in the debate.

But even Jake Tapper’s book documenting that Biden was senile and lost for much of his time in the White House is not good enough for some, such as Columbia Journalism professor Margaret Sullivan. In a column at the Guardian, Sullivan complained that the media cover-up of Biden’s dementia is a distraction from the real media problem: not enough reporting on Trump.

If you have thoughts on why someone would spend $124,000 to send their kid to Columbia to be taught journalism by Margaret Sullivan, please comment below.

Again, read widely, read wisely.

UPDATE: The date of the Hur report originally said “February 2020” when it was “February 2024.” I also added more examples of reporters’ screwups.