Jake Tapper’s Own ‘Original Sin’

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s a book that came out recently by Jake Tapper of CNN and Axios’ Alex Thompson called “Original Sin.” It’s about the cover-up, decline of former President Joe Biden and the disastrous choice of him choosing to run in 2024, until he was forcibly ejected from the ticket.

We all have problems with this. And it’s essentially Jake Tapper—it’s a co-authored book but it’s Jake Tapper. Jake Tapper is a CNN grandee. Seven-figure salary. Kind of an iconic figure in this left-wing media outlook. But my point is this, for the last four years, again and again and again, if anybody questioned the obvious mental decline of Joe Biden—his cognitive difficulties—Jake Tapper, and went on CNN, Jake Tapper tore them apart.

The locus classicus was Lara Trump, who said that he’s obviously—as early as 2020—in decline. And he suggested that she was berating him for a childhood stutter, which was absolutely ridiculous.

So, what is my point? Here is someone who promulgated the greatest cover-up in the history of the U.S. presidency—helped. And we were told that Joe Biden “was fit as the fiddle.” We had medical reports that obviously or mysteriously did not have one critical indicator that were apparent on the Trump and Obama presidential medical records releases. There was no PSA test, an indicator of the health or malignancy of one’s prostate. That was a cover-up too, as we’re starting to learn.

But my point is this, no one was more instrumental in berating—maybe Joe Scarborough, but other than he, Jake Tapper tore apart anybody who suggested that Joe Biden was as cognitive in decline as they saw with their own eyes and heard him. When The Wall Street Journal wrote in a definitive story, Jake Tapper wrote them off as Murdoch/Fox propagandists.

So, why are we here? Why did he write a book now? Well, the obvious answer is that Joe Biden has no power. And these media people in Washington are—they’re like moths to a flame. They gravitate to power. And when you don’t have power, you don’t have friends. And there’s no downside in telling the truth.

Why didn’t Jake Tapper write this a year ago? Because he knows what would’ve happened. Somebody in the White House would’ve called up and said, “Tapper, no one from CNN is gonna get a seat at a press conference. There’s not gonna be any CNN interview.” So he backed down.

And now in a very cowardly fashion, now he comes out and he is blaming the White House cover-up. But what he doesn’t tell us is the White House cover-up would have been impossible had not CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS all conspired with the White House staff to downplay—not just downplay Biden’s cognitive decline but attack people.

Bottom line: They had more interest in protecting this left-wing administration who was using this waxen effigy of Joe Biden and for someone’s purposes—we don’t know who was running the country, who was giving him the autopen executive orders. We have no idea who those people are. We have a suspicion that it was the Obama crowd.

But nevertheless, they didn’t care about that. They did not care about that. All they knew is that this was a left-wing agenda and it had to be preserved by any means necessary. And that included lying, lying, covering up, and worst of all, demonizing and attacking people who sought to tell the truth about Joe Biden.

And now, he wants to say—what? “I have a little humility. I may, may or not, I sort of, kind of was part of the cover-up. But now the real Jake Tapper is in this book, who’s now telling truth to power.” No, you’re telling truth to impotence.

Joe Biden has got cancer. He is written off. He’s in decline. The family is disgraced. It’s easy now to write about that. It was hard and would have required intellectual courage, moral fortitude to say this when he was the most powerful man in the world.

And so, Jake Tapper, you failed that test. And you should pay a penalty. CNN should look very carefully at whether they want to retain him because this is one of the greatest acts of duplicity, moral duplicity, I’ve seen in my entire life. And it joins a long, long, long list of collusion, capers, conspiracy, bogus, frauds, ruses.

Jake Tapper, you should go back and see what was your position on Russian collusion? What was your position on Hunter Biden laptop disinformation? What was your position on the Steele dossier? What was your position on the 51 intelligence authorities? And I think in every one of those cases, you failed the test of truth and you really did this time in the greatest cover-up in the history, as I said, of the American presidency.

And it’s not over yet because we’re gonna learn more and more, tragically, about Joe Biden’s medical condition and to see if not just whether the cognitive disabilities of Biden were covered up, but whether his prostate metastasized cancer contributed to that and that source was also covered up.

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