CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson are releasing a book on former President Joe Biden‘s mental decline during his time in office.
Tapper notoriously defended Biden’s mental acuity dating back to 2020. Throughout his term, Biden stumbled on his words, which was often chalked up to his former stutter. Biden eventually dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed his running mate, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
The book, titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, will be Tapper’s seventh release and Thompson’s first. Thompson originally had a contract with Simon and Schuster to release the book last year, but the publisher withdrew. Following Thompson’s public plea to find a new publisher and release the book in 2025, Penguin Press took on the project, and Tapper became a co-author.
“What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part 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.”
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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.