I actually know Jake Tapper's real defense for covering up Biden's dementia.
If he were being honest -- which he never is -- he'd say, "Look, my audience consists entirely of Trump-deranged liberals. I cannot report the truth without losing my entire career. CNN wouldn't even allow it. If I reported any of this before 2024 CNN would have had a 'talk' with me with the threat of suspension made clear. I'm showing 'bravery' [by Jake Tapper standards, at least] by just reporting a slim slice of the truth five years after it was obvious to all non-Trump-deranged liberals."
So Jake Tapper's Trump-deranged audience -- the only audience remaining after ten years of groteqesque leftwing propaganda from Jake Tapper and his fellow communists at CNN -- is abandoning him, and I am, as forty-two-year=old Millennials on Twitter say, here for it.
CNN host Jake Tapper had his lowest-rated month in nearly a decade in May despite a whirlwind publicity tour giving him an onslaught of attention.
Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson's new book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," was released in May to much fanfare. The book helped set the recent news cycle with new accusations of the Biden White House hiding the truth about the former president's fitness for office.
To promote the project, Tapper has embarked on a wide-ranging book tour that landed him on a variety of podcasts, talk shows and cable news. The book has also been promoted relentlessly across CNN, but the spotlight on Tapper has seemingly failed to give him a boost in viewership.
"The Lead with Jake Tapper" averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, shedding 25% of CNN's audience in its timeslot from the same period last year in the process.
By comparison, Fox News offerings "The Five" and "Special Report with Bret Baier" averaged 3.3 million viewers from April 28 through May 25, trouncing Tapper.
MSNBC also beat Tapper among total viewers, as programming on the progressive network averaged a little over one million viewers in the timeslot. As a result, Tapper settled for only 11% of the cable news audience share, while MSNBC managed 21% and Fox News commanded 68% during the timeframe.
It was Tapper's lowest-rated month since August 2015.
It also thrills me to say that MSNBC's ratings are also collapsing. And bear in mind, Comcast is trying to sell MSNBC to some chump. This is the worst time for MSNBC to see its ratings collapse.
MSNBC hit record lows, dropping 41% among primetime viewers, according to Mediaite.
The network's ratings dropped a total of 34% compared to May 2024.
MSNBC averaged 49,000 viewers during the day and 78,000 primetime viewers, marking its second-worst month in history, AdWeek reported.
It is partly due to Jake Tapper's loss of his already-small leftwing audience -- and partly just for Tapper's extreme Democrat/leftwing activism -- that Tapper and his co-author Thompson have very subtly shifted the main argument of their book from "Biden was demented and the cover-up is a national scandal" to "Biden wasn't transparent about his health and neither is Trump so we in the media have to double-down on suggesting Trump is incompetent to be president."
Alex Thompson wants you to know that after five years of covering for Biden, the media is finally ready to Speak Truth to Power by demanding Trump be "transparent" about his hypothetical, WITHOUT EVIDENCE health issues.
"Original Sin" co-author and Axios reporter Alex Thompson told MSNBC on Sunday that there needs to be "investigative reporting" on President Donald Trump's health after being "untransparent" about his records.
In light of several revelations about an alleged cover-up of former President Joe Biden's health in Thompson's book, "The Weekend: Primetime" co-host Ayman Mohyeldin asked him whether there is now a "double standard" in coverage for Biden's health compared to Trump's.
"And, certainly now, is there a double standard with the way we are covering it? I mean, are you out there also investigating and reporting about Trump's health in the same rigor that you did this book?" Mohyeldin asked.
Thompson said that while they knew little about Biden's health at the time, they knew "even less" about Trump's.
"He was completely untransparent during the 2023-2024 campaign," Thompson said. "He has not been transparent since, and there is no mechanism forcing him or any future president to be transparent about their health. He could be on anything. We really have no idea. So I think it's a really vital question."
He added that he has covered the lack of transparency from Trump in the past and considered the subject "completely fair."
"Donald Trump was older on his inauguration day than Joe Biden was on his. Donald Trump's health is completely fair game, and there should be incredibly investigative reporting on how it's affecting his job as president," Thompson said.
Jake Tapper blew similar smoke earlier, asserting that now that Biden's dementia has been exposed, it's time to hold Trump to the same a different standard.
If Trump were held to the same standard, Tapper would be doing a deep-dive into Trump's health five months after he leaves the presidency in 2029. Same as he did with Biden.
Tapper wants to make up for five years of cover-up for Biden by digging deep on Trump. He just interviewed Speaker Mike Johnson. After covering up the Biden, Inc. crime family for years -- actually, the cover-up continues, as Tapper still won't report on it -- he's now decided that he'll make up for past sins by investigating Trump for corruption.
Tapper attempted some whataboutism judo by demanding that Johnson investigate Trump's corrupt practices, asserted by Tapper WITHOUT EVIDENCE, because Johnson investigated Biden's foreign influence peddling.
TAPPER: You oversaw, as speaker, a congressional investigation into President Biden's ties to his son Hunter's questionable business dealings to enrich him. You seemed to think it was your responsibility to look into this sort of thing then.
M. JOHNSON: Yes, Jake, the big, important distinction, the Biden crime family, as they were named, earned that title. Why? Because they use shell companies, fake LLCs, series of what appeared to be money laundering operations. And Hunter Biden, of course, with his difficult past and his -- the corruption in his past, the family on the public dole -- or on the president's dole.
The president lied about his involvement in the business dealings, all of that. The evidence just piled up. And, by the way, at the same time, the evidence of his diminished mental capacity, subject of your book, of course. I wish had been published a year earlier, because everybody saw it. Everybody saw what was happening.
Drew Holden has a great thread destroying Tapper's foundational lie that the press "missed" the Biden dementia story. No, they didn't "miss" the story-- they eagerly engaged in the propaganda, claiming at each and every turn that what the public saw and heard with its own eyes was RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION AI CHEAPFAKES.
The thread has screenshots of all the headlines. See the thread for that. Here are some of the takeaways:
Drew Holden
@DrewHolden360
But this deceptive coverage was everywhere.
Tapper's own outlet, @CNN, blamed the characterization of Biden in part on "ageism" in an evasive piece of whataboutism when it comes to memory.
The rest of the press did likewise.
Over at @nytimes, the story was that "memory loss requires careful diagnosis" -- there was no way Hur could draw this conclusions!
Where was the "close medical assessment," huh?
Everyone in the media was coming out to defend Biden from Hur's mean characterization.
@AP said it was no different from mixing up the names of your kids.
We saw the same from @washingtonpost. @NBCNews added that even memory problems didn't "affect decision making or judgement." It was part of "significant misperceptions" about how our brains work.
A month later, the Biden team orchestrated the release of redacted comments meant to deceive the public into thinking Hur's characterization was unfair.
The authors lament that this clever move caused the press to miss the parts about Biden's decline.
This isn't true...
The media did anything but "miss" them. They trumpeted the news as vindicating Biden's cognitive capabilities.
Tapper's @CNN--courtesy of @oliverdarcy-- spiked the football. The new transcript "poured water on Hur's over-the-top characterization of Biden's mental fitness."
Read the whole thing. It's a double-stuffed Oreo of truth.
Jake Tapper covers his lies with fresh lies -- you see, he couldn't report on what was obvious to everyone based just on what can be seen and heard on videos, because none of Biden's inner circle would confirm/admit that the videos showed what they showed.
And of course you can't report a story without insider sources telling you that what you saw is what you saw.
Glenn Greenwald was on Megyn Kelly and noted that CNN itself disproves that. CNN and all the leftwing media outlets ran "hours" of speculation about Trump needing to be removed from office under the 25th amendment, and spent "hours" of coverage showing Trump walking gingerly down an ice-slicked ramp (he was wearing slippery dress shoes) and -- this one I completely forget -- holding a cup of coffee in some way that the leftwing media claimed showed some kind of physical degeneration.
There were no "insider sources" confirming these absurd stories. But CNN and MSNBC -- and Jake Tapper -- filled their airwaves with them for weeks.
Incidentally-- Jake Tapper says he "apologized" to Lara Trump.
In fact, he did nothing of the kind.
When [Laura] Ingraham pressed as to whether an apology actually happened over the phone, [Lara] Trump said "he called me and said he was going to do this and here we are." That prompted Ingraham to declare the situation "convoluted."
Megyn was inclined to agreed. "Did he actually say, 'I'm sorry,' or did he just say, 'When my book hits, I'm going to say that the right was correct,'" she asked. "I am now less sure than I was before that an actual apology was issued."
Whether those words were uttered or not, Greenwald said a phone call is not sufficient in this situation. "If you go on the air or in a column or whatever and you accuse somebody of something truly terrible like bullying kids with disabilities -- which is what he accused her of -- you don't call her privately and sort of say, 'Hey, you were right,'" he explained. "You go on the air and you say, 'I said something terrible. It was completely baseless. I apologize to Lara Trump.'"
While Tapper claimed Trump "saw something that I did not see at the time," he has subsequently suggested that he was duped because the Biden White House wasn't being honest.
"And I think that we need to be skeptical of everything that we are told by people in power. And I mean that obviously should be the mantra of being a journalist to begin with. If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source," Tapper said on PBS last week. "But we just need to remember that. Like, politicians lie. White Houses lie. Power is an aphrodisiac, and we just need to all remember that and not take at face value anything that we're told."
Greenwald said the exchange, which also involved The Atlantic's Jeffery Goldberg, was embarrassing. "Watching a person who is 56 years old, who has been in... journalism for 30 years, be asked by Jeffrey Goldberg, 'What is the lesson that we are all supposed to take from this?' And then he says -- as though it was the most profound insight -- 'We really have to remember that people in power lie... and, therefore, we can't take what they say at face value.' If I were to teach a journalism course to eighth graders, that would be the very first thing I would emphasize on the very first day," he noted.
As he explained, it is hard to believe "Jake Tapper just woke up," but he thinks the framing is part of a larger strategy. Tapper and Thompson reportedly hired a crisis PR firm to help them navigate the book launch, and Greenwald said he sees those fingerprints are all over the authors' media tour -- beginning with their appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show.
"[Tapper] kept using this phrase with you... 'I look back on my coverage with some humility.' This is the kind of thing that they tell you to say so that you seem like you're taking accountability even though you are absolutely not," Greenwald noted. "Like, what does that mean? You were the one who helped to lead the cover up that you are now... making millions of dollars off of exposing. It is a huge scandal."
Matt Taibbi is unimpressed by Jake Tapper's shoeleather reporting five years too late:
No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error. But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden. Harris, loyal to Biden to a fault, might never say such a thing. But plenty of people around her would... "We got so screwed by Biden as a party," David Plouffe, who helped run the Harris campaign, told us.. Harris, he said, was a "great soldier," but the compressed 107-day race was "a fucking nightmare.""And it's all Biden," Plouffe said. Referring to Biden's decision to run for reelection, then wait more than three weeks to bow out, Plouffe added: "He totally fucked us."
The book's opening lines tell us we're supposed to be shocked by Joe Biden's delusional state...
Millions were shocked by Biden's unintelligible, slack-jawed performance at the debate, but some Democrats weren't surprised at all. Though they had seen him like this behind closed doors, they didn't say anything. For a variety of reasons, they rationalized their silence.