Disgraced former president Joe Biden on Friday claimed he could "beat the hell out of" journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, authors of a recent book about his cognitive decline. Biden, 82, was speaking to reporters for the first time since his alleged prostate cancer diagnosis earlier this month.
Asked about recent discussions of his "mental and physical capabilities" while serving as president—an apparent reference to the explosive details Tapper and Thompson reported in Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again—Biden lashed out at the authors, implying they were liars who couldn't hold their own in a two-and-one bout against an octogenarian who struggles to walk and has a history of trying to converse with dead people.
"You can see that," Biden said, attempting sarcasm. "I'm mentally incompetent, and I can't walk, and I could beat the hell out of both of them." He also dismissed comments from Democrats who defended him at the time but now argue that Biden should not have run for reelection. "Why didn't he run against me then?" he said, lunging toward the female reporter in a threatening manner. "Because I'd have beaten them." It wasn't immediately clear if he meant physically "beaten," or in the electoral sense.
This is hardly the first time Biden has threatened to beat up a journalist. He did so in June 2024 after a Time magazine reporter questioned his fitness to serve as president. "I can do it better than anybody you know," Biden said. "You're looking at me, I can take you too." White House staffers were often terrified of Biden's "quick-trigger temper" and often tried to "avoid meeting alone with him." Increased agitation and aggression is a common symptom of dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
WATCH: Unhinged Joe Biden Attacks the Free Press, Democracy Itself
Joe Biden is not even the first member of the Biden family to threaten Jake Tapper with physical violence. His crackhead son, Hunter, accosted the CNN journalist at the Super Bowl in 2018. Hunter, who was presumably in the midst of one of his many crack-fueled binges, reportedly "put his arm around Tapper’s shoulders and told him that, if the two men were not in a public setting, 'I would knock you out.'" The younger Biden had (falsely) accused Tapper of reporting on the (true) allegations of Hunter's rampant drug use and even more rampant adultery. Tapper opted not to defend his honor by fighting.
