OPINION:
Ladies, gentlemen and children of all ages, step right up to witness Jake Tapper’s Awesome (and Embarrassing) Accountability Circus, now on its Never-Ending World Tour.
This week’s top act in the center ring? Mr. Tapper himself, performing a daring feat of public self-reflection and media backpedaling that involves death-defying sentences like, “Knowing what I know now …” and “I feel tremendous humility.”
Mr. Tapper, CNN’s antsy anchor who started his journalism career at a stoned-out D.C. rag and once dated Monica Lewinsky, has spent the past few weeks explaining why he never told network viewers that President Biden was a mess mentally, but now tells all in a new book — for a price ($27 on Amazon, already down from the list price of $32).
His latest tome, aptly titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” has been making all the wrong waves inside the Beltway. You’d think writing an insider book about the political chaos of an ailing president on his way down would turn you into the toast of Washington. Instead, Mr. Tapper has found himself making endless excuses about why he never bothered to tell us just how bad it was when it was actually happening.
The latest act was Mr. Tapper admitting to Piers Morgan that Mr. Biden’s White House attempts to cover up his cognitive decline might have been “worse than Watergate.” Yes, Watergate, the scandal that started all the “-gate” scandals, the one with break-ins, disappearing tapes and, eventually, a presidential resignation.
Asked about a paragraph in the book in which Mr. Tapper denies that the former president’s health cover-up was comparable to Watergate, Mr. Tapper took one look at Mr. Morgan’s raised eyebrow and said — you know what? Scratch that. Worse. Definitely worse.
Mr. Tapper’s public self-flagellation didn’t stop there. He admitted that conservative media outlets (gasp!) might have been right all along about Mr. Biden’s cognitive struggles (the same outlets Ms. Lewinsky’s date had berated throughout Uncle Joe’s lone term in office). He even went so far as to flat-out say the words, “Conservative media was right.”
And while Mr. Tapper was busy telling Megyn Kelly that “there should be a lot of soul-searching among legacy media,” Mr. Biden’s slide into the fog that overcomes us all in our 80s never seemed to become clear to Mr. Tapper. “Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, ‘We were hip to this and the legacy media was not.’ Now I do not accept that I was part of cover-up. I do not accept that I was just providing cover for Joe Biden.”
But of course he was part of Joementia-gate, every day. At one point, Mr. Tapper berated President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who was then running the Republican National Committee, when she presumed to question Mr. Biden’s mental acuity in an awkward episode that prompted the CNN anchor to personally apologize to her, but not until he was trying to hawk a book.
To add another layer of intrigue, the book authors describe the White House like a secret politburo where only five people were truly in charge. According to the book, those five were first lady Jill Biden (obviously), son Hunter Biden (duh) and three political veterans bent on hiding Mr. Biden’s true mental state: Chief of Staff Ron Klain, senior adviser Annie Tomasini and the first lady’s top adviser, Anthony Bernal.
The humiliation circus includes Mr. Tapper’s co-author, Alex Thompson of the inside-Washington, left-wing Axios publication. In one recent interview, Mr. Thompson said one of their 200 sources told them, “When you’re voting for a president, you’re voting for the aides around him.” Who knew? Most Americans think they’re, you know, voting to pick one guy as president.
“And one of the things that really, I think, comes out in our reporting here is that if you believe — and I think a lot of these people do sincerely believe — that Donald Trump was and is an existential threat to democracy — you can rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things,” Mr. Thompson said.
Mr. Tapper knows it’s all bad, reportedly enlisting crisis public relations maven Risa Heller, best known for trying to redeem clients such as Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Holmes, to try to stem the terrible press. But it all seems far too late.
The best part of Mr. Tapper’s humiliation tour is his having to admit that for all those years, he failed as a journalist. “Knowing what I know now, obviously, I feel tremendous humility about my coverage,” he told Ms. Kelly in an embarrassing interview. “I’ve said I look back at my coverage with humility, and I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity.”
Spoken like a true legacy media tool of the Democratic Party.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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