Tapper’s Tombstone for the Legacy Media
Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again
by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson
Penguin Press
352 pp., $32.00
You almost have to admire the sheer chutzpah. Here we have a book about the mental decline of Joe Biden and how it was a terrible thing that it was hidden from the public. Except that the book was written by two journalists who themselves actively participated in the cover-up. Tapper is a senior anchor with CNN, Thompson is a writer with the online news site Axios, and both were among the left-leaning members of the press corps who drank the Kool-Aid dispensed in the White House crystal. Tapper even vehemently attacked anyone who questioned Biden’s mental fitness.
The pivot of the story, as told by Tapper and Thompson, is the early debate between Biden and Trump in the 2024 campaign, during which Biden seemed lost, weak, and incoherent. Mid-debate, Trump summed up Biden’s performance with a killer line: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Tapper was one of the debate’s moderators, and it was during the debate that he realized (he now claims) that Biden was not up to the task of being president for another four years. It is an astonishing “revelation”—astonishing, because large chunks of the country had reached that conclusion long before. All the signs had been there: the shuffling gait, the blank stares, the muddled sentences that trailed off into nonsense, the lapses of memory.
As in many cases of mental decline, there were days when Biden seemed as functional as ever. But as his presidency staggered on, the number of good days decreased while the bad days got worse.
Tapper and Thompson say they based their book on interviews with hundreds of sources, both inside and outside the White House. The flaw in this method is that the sources are all anonymous and without good reason, as many of their comments merely state the obvious. It is not clear why all of these sources insisted on anonymity. Maybe they were too embarassed to acknowledge the extent to which they had been in the tank for the Biden White House.
It is certainly the case that the people around Biden went to great lengths to hide the spiraling decline of their boss. Important meetings were canceled at the last moment without explanation. The only journalists who were allowed access were those who were reliably friendly. Public events were rare and tightly controlled. Given his propensity to stumble, Biden was steered away from staircases. His speeches relied on a teleprompter in extra-large print, with stage directions provided to stop him from wandering off.
Tapper and Thompson go through all this and do their best to cast the White House staff as the source of the problem. But Biden’s aides were not the real villains: after all, they were only doing the job they were being paid to do. In a way, you have to sympathize with them. Despite all their efforts and machinations, the Big Guy repeatedly found ways to make a mess of things. Yes, Biden’s guardians were manipulative and thoroughly dishonest. But the deception worked only because the Washington media—insiders like Jack Tapper—allowed it to work. It is not difficult to manipulate someone when he wants to be manipulated. There were probably times when the White House spin doctors chuckled about how easy it was to have the press corps swallow whatever was dangled before them, like trained seals jumping for fish.
Of all the journalists in legacy media, it was Tapper who was the most constant and ardent advocate for Biden. He often did much more than accept the defensive tactics of the Biden cabal. His favored recourse was the “stutter defense,” in which he attacked anyone who questioned Biden’s labyrinthine language and empty expressions as mean-spirited snipes at his childhood disability. Tapper’s interview with Lara Trump was a perfect illustration of how far he would go in naked aggression. Of course, in this book he never examines how a stutter could explain bizarre Bidenisms like calling a female supporter in New Hampshire “a lying, dog-faced pony soldier” and ending a speech on gun safety with the non sequitur, “God save the Queen.”
The central problem for Tapper and Thompson, as they seek to rewrite the past, is that history is a stubborn set of facts. A troop of conservative commentators have had no difficulty finding numerous clips of Tapper, and to a lesser extent Thompson, speaking in embarrassingly glowing terms about Biden’s legislative and personal achievements, and heaping scorn on anyone who doubted his mental acuity. Unfortunately for Tapper and Thompson, the real record is there for anyone with an Internet connection.
The pace picked up when Trump emerged as the Republican candidate. Certainly, the media swung aggressively against Biden after their debate, but the reason was that his encroaching senility could no longer be disguised. And letting Trump back into the Oval Office was unacceptable to the legacy media. This was Biden’s real and unforgiveable sin, according to Tapper and Thompson: not that he was incapable of governing, but that his decision to run again ensured a Trump victory.
For his part, Biden believed that he won the debate, and he seemed unable to understand what all the fuss was about. On several occasions, Biden insisted polls showed he would beat Trump but, in the real world, no such polls existed. Even now, he maintains that he would have coasted to a historic triumph, though he and Jill are probably the only ones in the country who hold that opinion.
Tapper and Thompson are vague in describing exactly how Biden was finally convinced to give way to Harris, with various members of the cast providing different theories in interviews. Tapper and Thompson readily accept the establishment orthodoxy that Harris, anointed as the new Democrat messiah, did not have enough time to present herself as a convincing candidate. But this dances around the facts that she had been vice president for more than three years, enjoyed fawning media support, and had a ton of money to spend. Despite these huge advantages, she still managed to lose, and lose badly. Nevertheless, Tapper and Thompson insist it was Biden who was responsible for Trump’s victory.
One might have hoped that the outcome of the 2024 election would cause the scribblers of the legacy media to reflect on their role and realize how far out of step they were with the national electorate. That did not happen. Instead, they preferred to ratchet up their hatred of Trump, even beyond the level of the Trump Derangement Syndrome that defined the legacy media’s reporting of his first term. Hatred has become their raison d’être. It is what they do; it is all they do. They have forgotten nothing and learned nothing.
Thompson has at least been willing to reflect critically on how it all went so wrong. In a recent speech—ironically, when he was being presented with a journalism award—he admitted, “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. We missed a lot of the story. And some people trust us less because of it.”
That is, however, a long way from a mea culpa. Thompson, like Tapper, puts the emphasis on “missing” the story. No, Alex and Jake, you and your colleagues did not “miss” the story. Rather, you colluded in a years-long pattern of deception. It was deliberate and systematic. Pleading incompetence now is simply not believable.
How dumb do they think voters are? Did Tapper and Thompson really believe that everyone would simply forget about what they had shouted for years? Did they, in their bottomless arrogance, assume that those outside the Washington bubble would believe them instead of the evidence of their own eyes? And what were the publishers of Original Sin thinking when they wrote out large advance checks for a tome which is essentially an attempt to cover up their gaslighting?
The book might be an exercise in hypocrisy and folly but, unwittingly, it raises important questions. The most significant are whether the legacy media can survive, and whether they should. Broadcast and print media as a whole are under continued pressure from evolving social media technology. CNN in particular is circling the financial drain, with the company locked into massive salaries for its talking heads even while revenue shrinks fast. Tapper could well be out of a job by the end of the year as the organization collapses around him.
Neither he nor Thompson enhance their reputations with Original Sin, despite the book’s grandiose pretensions. Instead, their blame-shifting and revisionism make them look like hucksters. The book will most likely be remembered as one of the nails in the coffin of the legacy media, a final memorial for a class of too-clever tricksters who believed they had a right to tell everyone else what they should think. So perhaps, in a roundabout and ironic way, we owe Tapper and Thompson a debt of gratitude, insofar as they inadvertently reveal the extent of the corruption and hubris of the legacy media. The real story they tell is a far cry from the one they thought they were telling. In the end, no amount of chutzpah could be enough.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/tappers-tombstone-for-the-legacy-media