Saunders: Why did Tapper wait until now to admit Biden’s decline?

By Debra J. Saunders / Las Vegas Review-Journal

Penguin Press touts its new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, as “an explosive account of one of the most hubristic mistakes in American history: Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election despite mounting evidence of his decline, and his team’s increasingly desperate efforts to hide it.”

But the most egregious hubris I see is the title of the book itself, even ahead of its May 20 release. What the title describes as a cover-up was, after all, liberal bias. News that could hurt a Democrat and help Donald Trump, why, that just wasn’t a worthy story for many in my profession.

On NewsNation Wednesday, Mark Halperin, founder of the 2Way media platform, called it “the biggest media scandal in American history.” That’s the book that begs to be written.

As a CNN anchor, Tapper was uniquely positioned to challenge the Biden White House during interviews with the president and top staff, but he muffed it.

There’s a widely circulated clip on X of Tapper berating Lara Trump in 2020 after the president’s daughter-in-law had commented on Biden’s cognitive decline. “I think you were mocking his stutter,” a huffy Tapper charged.

Now that Biden is out — and Trump is in — Tapper is ready to say, and profit from, what readers and Lara Trump knew years ago because the Biden White House could not cover it up.

Poll after poll showed the vast majority of Americans were concerned about Biden’s age and thought he was too old to serve a second term. Voters weren’t fooled. Ever.

One journalist who saw the story in real time is co-author Thompson, of Axios, who received the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage last month for reporting on Biden’s cognitive decline.

“We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it,” Thompson said as he accepted the honor at the White House Correspondents Dinner. “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.”

“I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust,” Thompson noted before uttering a simple truth. “We should have done better.”

On CNN Wednesday, Tapper acknowledged that some of the criticism coming his way is fair. “I look back on it with humility,” he said of his see-no-decline treatment of the former president.

Baby steps. I don’t expect humility to bubble all over the media-industrial complex.

Semafor Editor Ben Smith offered on 2Way Tonight that he wishes he had covered Biden’s cognitive decline more, but “we all see what we want to see.”

And Smith should know.

Days before Trump took the oath of office in 2017, when Smith was in charge of BuzzFeed, the site posted the bogus Steele “dossier.” Then followed a media frenzy that had the Washington press corps chasing nonexistent collusion — they were sniffing for dirt and even reported on a fictional “pee tape” — between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The dossier turned out to be a piece of misinformation bankrolled by the Democratic National Committee and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

In 2023, Smith wrote in The Atlantic that even though BuzzFeed’s international editor told him the dossier was “not just unconfirmed” and contained “clear errors,” he would run it again.

Facts optional. No wonder so many Americans don’t trust the media.