There are a few key questions Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book should attempt to answer.

I notice that Charlie Cooke has also decided to write about the reheated news of note that CNN television anchor Jake Tapper and political reporter Alex Thompson (now of Axios, but until recently of Politico) have announced that they will be publishing a book about Joe Biden’s attempt to run for reelection in 2024 despite having exhibited clear signs of radical mental decline as early as his first months in office. But if you’ve been reading me long enough, you already know that this is an obsession of mine as well: I consider it to be the single greatest scandal in American presidential history.

And the proposed title seemingly says it all, doesn’t it? Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. Yes, a lengthy, anecdote-filled journalistic tome about the hidden decay of America’s first true puppet president — I can’t wait to read it myself, and I may even have to put on my lucky reviewing hat for the first time here at NR when it comes out, for a longer article.

Surely I don’t need to explain why I’m interested in learning the deeper details about how Joe Biden’s senescence was concealed from the “public,” but understand why I write “public” in scare quotes: because it sure as heck wasn’t concealed from you the reader, from me the writer, or from any of the staff here at NR (as we enjoy reminding our purported mainstream media “betters”). In fact, I wrote what I consider to be my second most important piece of last year about this exact subject, the appalling truth that for four years, we had a president who was really just a “front” for unnamed powers behind the throne:

After reading through the Journal’s report twice I have provisionally concluded that, despite all the various financial scandals, crony corruption, authoritarian overreach, and third-rate burglaries in American politics, this is the biggest scandal the presidency has ever seen, because it runs to the core of what the presidency is supposed to be. For practically his entire term, Joe Biden has been, if not non compos mentis — on a rare “good day” — then at least severely mentally diminished or periodically incapacitated. At no point during his time in office has he been fit for the presidency.

So I can’t wait to see what Tapper and Thompson turn up. But I certainly hope that at least half of this book is also about a scandal that matches the Biden administration’s in its brazenness and complete forfeiture of trust: the media’s collective decision to collude with them in hiding, or otherwise choosing not to explore, the obvious signs of Biden’s decline and isolation. Because the single most important piece I wrote last year was a half-articulated cry of despair from the end of the year, posing a rhetorical question that remains unanswered:

Let us take the media professionals at their word, that they really had no idea things were this bad with Joe Biden until the sudden meltdown of the debate. Let us take them at their word that the revelations of the Wall Street Journal‘s piece about his concealed collapse took them by complete surprise. If that is the case, I end with a sincere question: Of what value are these people? If the media professionals really didn’t know — when I could tell, when you could tell, when it was a key concern among voters — if every media organ was so flat-footed, incurious, or flummoxed by White House smoke and mirrors that none of them ever thought to seriously investigate whether the president of the United States might secretly be in the midst of massive mental collapse, then why should we respect them? What would we say it is they do here? What are they bringing to the table when they are missing the biggest story of the last four years, one hiding in plain sight?

I’m frankly not terribly interested in the story of Biden’s mental collapse itself; after all, most of us have seen elderly people decline, and it’s a depressingly similar story every time. Instead, I truly hope that the majority of Tapper and Thompson’s upcoming book is devoted to how Biden’s minions persuaded the entirety of the mainstream media to remain silent and incurious about it all those long years — years when it was obvious to the rest of the nation that something was deeply amiss. The code of media silence was ruthlessly enforced — for all the good it did Joe Biden in the public’s estimation — and the question remains unanswered: Who were the enforcers? Was it just the Biden administration? Or was the media’s decision to forfeit its curiosity about Biden’s health while it still had the chance to matter a question of self-enforcement? And why should we ever take the media seriously after this? There are two original sins here, after all: Biden’s decision to run for office again, and the media’s decision to go happily along with it until the exact moment it could no longer be concealed.

I hope this new book — from two of the mainstream media’s most well-regarded members — addresses those questions. Or else I’m not sure what the point of it is.