CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s in-the-moment reaction to former President Joe Biden’s dreadful debate performance against Donald Trump last year: “Holy f–k.”
That is what Tapper told Megyn Kelly on her show on Tuesday. Tapper was on the program to promote “Original Sin,” the new book he co-authored with Axios reporter Alex Thompson that looks at Biden’s cognitive and physical decline while in the White House.
The veteran CNN star said he was not as explicit in what he messaged to his production team during the broadcast — Tapper said he sent the crew a message saying “holy smokes.” But he could not believe how poor the president was performing, Tapper told Kelly, and he also could not believe that Biden and his wife, Jill, seemed oblivious to how poorly it went after the debate.
“They come over, and they really didn’t seem to have any idea that this had been as bad as it was,” Tapper said. “It was very awkward. He said something about ‘sorry about my cold,’ and he tried to say something about how much Trump lies.”
He added: “Sometimes you think like, did I just see that? Did I just witness this 90-minute event?”
Less than a month after debating Trump last June, Biden quit his 2024 campaign.
At a different point in the interview on Tuesday, Tapper said that he and Thompson found during their reporting that there were signs of the “non-functioning Biden” dating back to 2015.
Tapper and Thompson have been making the media rounds to promote “Original Sin” recently. Last week, Tapper said there was “not enough” media coverage of Biden’s cognitive decline during his presidency, including from himself.
When asked by his CNN colleague John Berman what he think of “conservatives criticizing you and the media” for failing to highlight Biden’s decline while in office, Tapper said some of the criticism is fair.
“I’m not going to speak for anybody else, but knowing then what I know now, I look back at my coverage during the Biden years — and I did cover some of these issues, but not enough — I look back on it with humility.”
Some on X and elsewhere have criticized Tapper for publishing the book after he ridiculed those who have questioned Biden’s mental acuity in recent years. One notable example features a clip of Tapper ripping Lara Trump in 2020 for saying Biden was dealing with a “cognitive decline.”
“I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline,” he told her at the time.
On Tuesday, Tapper told Kelly he later called Trump to tell her she was right. “She saw something that I did not see at the time,” Tapper said. “100 percent. And I own that.”
