CNN host Jake Tapper announced that he and Axios reporter (and CNN analyst) Alex Thompson have a book coming out in May titled "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." They promise "an unflinching and explosive reckoning."
Conservative reaction was fierce. CNN was part of the cover-up. You can't find them running this kind of "sinful" expose in 2023 and 2024 on Joe Biden's decline. You can easily find Brian Stelter and others promoting the notion of a 25th Amendment removal of President Donald Trump as "mentally unfit" in his first term. You can also find then-CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy echoing Biden spokesman Ian Sams, ripping the liberal media for helping the Republicans push a Biden-decline message.
That said, we need a book like this that finally exposes what happened behind the scenes in the Biden White House. We can hope these journalists spend time on how the Biden-voter media failed to reveal these ugly realities in real time. A book like this should have been written in 2022 or 2023. If Tapper and Thompson viewed it as "disastrous" for Biden to run again, journalists were cowed into being part of the disaster.
A year ago, Dylan Byers of Puck laid out this spectacle: "For better or worse, many in the WH press corps have spent the last couple years noticeably avoiding the topic of the president's agility and acuity because it felt indelicate or irrelevant. Now, the Hur report has stirred some soul-searching."
It was considered "indelicate" to investigate. It was "unseemly." Special counsel Robert Hur's report -- where he said Biden couldn't be prosecuted for possessing classified documents in his garage because he'd come across to a jury as an "elderly man with a poor memory" -- could have been the moment where Pelosi & Co. pressured Biden to drop his reelection bid.
As usual for Democrat presidents, the "mainstream" book publishers had no appetite for a Biden tell-all. In 2021, Politico announced that Thompson (then on their staff) signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to author "a comprehensive book on Biden's presidency." Later, Politico announced the publisher changed its mind, citing the "soft market for books about President Joe Biden."
Liberals always find a "soft market" for books critical of Democrats when it could harm their chances. But they stuffed the bookcase full of Trump "tell-alls." Journalists tend to wait to admit Reality until the election is over. Hence the Hunter Biden laptop wasn't real until the media acknowledged it in 2022. This feels the same -- it's too late, unless you're going to shame some very dishonest Biden insiders out of power in the future.
The irony of all of this is the Democrats were running around preaching about "threats to democracy" while they allowed a secret cabal running the White House for an (at least occasionally) incapacitated president. They tried to shame Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) for running in the primary for president with an explicit message that Biden didn't have the capacity for a second term. Democrats kept Phillips off some state ballots.
Tapper and Thompson's book carries this promotional blurb: "In the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, dooming the Democrats to defeat."
More revelations about the audacity of Team Biden should underline that it's the Democrats that presented more of a threat to democracy in the last four years.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member