Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson want us to believe they set out to write the definitive account of the White House cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. What they actually delivered — likely by accident — is the definitive exposé of media malpractice, including their own. No matter how much they try to use this book as proof of their good intentions and their status as victims of a well-orchestrated ruse, it instead reveals just how deeply the press colluded with the White House to keep Americans in the dark about the president’s obvious cognitive decline.
There was a moment, as Tapper and Thompson began making the rounds to promote the book, when it looked like some in the media might finally be ready to come clean. Maybe, just maybe, they’d learned something from the years they spent running cover for a man clearly unfit to do the job. But no. "Original Sin" isn’t about introspection or accountability. It’s about whitewashing the press’s role and shifting the blame to a few conveniently unnamed White House officials, while the journalists who helped orchestrate the cover-up skate by unscathed.
The book was always going to be a whitewash. We knew that. While PJ Media and other conservative outlets were looking at video evidence and saying, “something is wrong with Joe Biden,” Tapper blamed it on his stutter, other outlets dismissed videos as “cheap fakes,” thought nothing of his extended vacations, and quoted insiders claiming he was a “beast” behind the scenes running circles around his aides. There is no person covered more extensively by the media than the president of the United States, and for anyone to claim they didn’t know what was going on is a lie.
Related: This Might Be the WORST Revelation About the Biden Health Cover Up
Pretending that CNN, Tapper, and the rest of the corporate media weren’t complicit is laughable. Their silence, their spin, and their refusal to confront the truth when it mattered most are a central part of the story — and the book deliberately ignores it. That's because “Original Sin” was never meant to spark a reckoning. It’s just a vehicle to pivot the scrutiny back onto Trump and revive the tired “health concerns” narrative the media clung to throughout his first term.
Tapper made that pivot crystal clear in his interview with Wolf Blitzer. He said the media needs to be “even more aggressive” in demanding transparency about a president’s health — but not Biden’s. No, Tapper turned the spotlight right back on Trump, saying, “President Trump, while he appears healthy, he has not been transparent about his health records,” a claim he made without offering a shred of evidence. After years of shielding Biden from scrutiny, they’re now preparing to relaunch the very attacks they once claimed were “ageist” and, thus, beneath them. This book isn’t a reckoning; it’s a blueprint for another scorched-earth campaign against Trump.
Nothing about this is sincere.
The press spent Trump’s first term fearmongering about his mental health. They trotted out TV psychiatrists, obsessively analyzed video clips, and openly speculated about the 25th Amendment. The same media that was desperate to find infirmity in Trump turned a blind eye when Biden’s cognitive decline was on full display. When Biden could barely finish a sentence or find his way off a stage, the media cried “cheap fake!” and attacked anyone who dared to point out the obvious. This wasn’t ignorance; it was intentional. And now they want to pretend they were duped all along?
We cannot let them get away with this.
