Critics of Jake Tapper are outraged after the veteran CNN reporter worked tirelessly to position himself as an expert on the decline of former President Joe Biden, with some have called Tapper a “hypocrite” for taking this stance after years of defending the elderly politician.
Tapper’s upcoming book, “Original Sin,” co-authored with Axios’s Alex Thompson, is set to be released later this month and delves into the lead-up to Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. Its imminent release has left Democrats on edge, as they face mounting allegations that many in the party helped cover up Biden’s apparent mental decline, which was clearly visible to those around him and to any fair-minded person who saw Biden’s decline in real time with slurred speeched, falls, and other signs.
During Biden’s term, Tapper portrayed the then-president on CNN as a paragon of statesmanship, brushing off concerns about Biden’s rambling non-sequiturs as unfounded and attributing his difficulties in media interviews to a lifelong “stutter.” These defenses of Biden were enough to fuel the anger of Tapper’s critics, who saw it as a clear double standard.
“Jake Tapper covered Biden’s ass the entire time. And is now running to the other side and throwing his reporter hat on,” one X user raged. Another agreed, adding, “Jake Tapper wrote a book about the coverup of Biden’s decline, as if he played no role in it at all. It’s quite amazing. Tapper smeared and attacked people who brought up Biden’s decline, including Democrats.” Said another X user: “Tapper is a shameless hypocrite, and the proceeds from the book should fund billboards across the country that say ‘Mea culpa – Jake Tapper.'”
Seems like a good time to remind everyone that in 2020 Jake Tapper, first, accused me of making fun of people with a stutter (an atrocious accusation) and then attempted to shut me down and ended our interview when I tried to warn people of Joe Biden’s very obvious cognitive… pic.twitter.com/ZOxSGQP13J
— Lara Trump (@LaraLeaTrump) June 27, 2024
Fox News’ John Roberts and Joe Concha went so far as to dedicate an entire segment of a recent program to bashing Tapper for his attempt to “rewrite history” with “Original Sin,” calling him part of a media elite who “tied [themselves] in knots in trying to either dismiss this or cover it up.”
“It is just patently insulting that Jake Tapper is trying to rewrite history while lining his own pockets in the process. He was very much a part of the media cabal who defended Biden,” Concha said, according to the New York Post. “He blamed a stutter, he called Lara Trump a conspiracy theorist when she appeared on his show for simply pointing out the obvious that Joe Biden had no business being anywhere near the Oval Office years ago.”
“But now that Joe Biden is expendable in the eyes of Democrats, and you know the books are going to come, the leaks are going to come, it’s all a CYA for everybody involved,” he continued. “Now people are trying to profit off of it.”
