CNN network Jake Tapper and Axios writer Alex Thompson are releasing a book on former President Joe Biden‘s cognitive decline during his time in office.
Tapper extremely defended Biden’s mental clarity dating back to 2020. Throughout his term, Biden stumbled on his words, which was often chalked up to his previous stutter. Biden later dropped out of the 2024 culture and endorsed his running mate, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The book, titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Fatal Choice to Work Again, may be Tapper’s sixth launch and Thompson’s second. Thompson previously had a deal with Simon and Schuster to launch the book last month, but the editor withdrew. Following Thompson’s open appeal to find a new editor and release the text in 2025, Penguin Press took on the job, and Tapper became a co-author.
” What you will discover makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem astonishingly selfish, self-delusional, and irresponsible— a desperate gamble that went bust — and component of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents”, Penguin Press wrote in a press release.
Tapper quoted author Toni Morrison in his announcement of the book, writing,” If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it”.
The host has since been met with a barrage of backlash online due to his former defense of Biden. A clip of Tapper arguing on-air with Lara Trump made renewed rounds online.
” It’s very clearly a cognitive decline”, Trump told Tapper, which prompted him to talk over her.
” Okay. You have no — it’s so amazing to me that — a cognitive decline? I think you were mocking his stutter”, Tapper told Trump as she continued to lay her case. ” And I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline. I would think that somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive. To people who do not have medical licenses, diagnosing politicians from afar. Plenty of people have diagnosed your father from afar, and I’m sure it offends you — your father-in-law”.
” Amazing. When you call out Joe Biden’s decline for 3 years and say that he should step aside, you get called a conspiracy theorist”, Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins wrote on X in response to Tapper’s announcement. ” When a CNN reporter finally catches up with reality, they get to sell books and pretend like it never happened”.
MSNBC HOSTS SWARM TO SUPPORT JOY REID AND CONDEMN NETWORK THAT FIRED HER
Both authors said they interviewed” 200 White House insiders” for the book. Tapper was notably the moderator for a presidential debate between Biden and President Donald Trump last year, in which Biden performed poorly. Thompson and Tapper wrote that the debate “was the natural result of an eighty-one-year-old man whose faculties had been diminishing for years”.
The book will be released on May 20.
