An unearthed five-year-old interview is rightly making the rounds this week. It stars CNN’s Jake Tapper and Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of President Donald Trump.

In the 2020 interview, weeks before Election Day, Lara Trump made the case that former President Joe Biden appeared to show signs of cognitive decline. She wasn’t wrong — even one year earlier, Democrats were saying the same thing. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) said in September 2019: “There’s a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden’s ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling. There are definitely moments when you listen to Joe Biden and you just wonder.” Rep. Julián Castro (D-TX) told Joe Biden in September 2019: “Are you forgetting already what you said just two minutes ago? I can’t believe that you said two minutes ago that they had to buy [into Biden’s Medicare plan] and now you’re saying they don’t have to buy in. You’re forgetting that?”

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But when Lara Trump broached Biden’s decline in that interview with Tapper, the CNN “anchor” went into full defense mode on behalf of his preferred candidate in the race by citing Biden’s stutter as the reason he was having memory trouble and communication troubles in general. “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?” Tapper asked Trump. 

“First and foremost, I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter,” Trump responded. “I think what we see onstage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very clearly a cognitive decline. That’s what I’m referring to. It makes me uncomfortable.”

Tapper responded by going into his patented pious mode.

“I would think that somebody in the family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar,” he shot back. “Plenty of people have diagnosed your father-in-law from afar, and I’m sure it offends you. You don’t have any standing.”

“I’m saying Joe Biden is struggling at times onstage, and it’s concerning to a lot of people that this could be the leader of the free world,” Trump retorted. “That is all I’m saying. I genuinely feel sorry for Joe Biden.”

“I’m sure [your comments] were from a place of concern. We all believe that,” Tapper snarked in return. 

In a related story, Tapper is now heavily promoting a book he’s written with Axios’s Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. It’s the best unintentional comedy out there, given how Tapper scolded Trump for making an obvious observation. Biden would stay in his basement for the majority of the 2020 campaign, doing softball interviews with handpicked “journalists” that often felt scripted, underscoring Trump’s point. 

Since that interview, there have been numerous instances in which Tapper has played the role of Biden’s defender instead of an inquisitive, objective journalist. 

After Biden’s last State of the Union address, which involved lots of shouting, Tapper said, “He certainly seemed like an 81-year-old, but he didn’t seem incapable of doing the job.” 

Tapper made the argument in recent book tour interviews that the fault of not covering Biden’s decline the right way was because the press were victims of a lying White House. 

“The bottom line is the White House was lying not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own Cabinet, staffers, Democrats in Congress, about how bad things had gotten,” he said on CNN this week. 

Yes, the poor media were told that Biden was A-OK, and they had no choice but to believe them. The only problem with this defense is that it flies in the face of what was and is reality. 

In other words, the press should have simply ignored what they saw and heard from the 46th president when he was allowed to be in public. 

Shaking hands with the air after a speech? Never happened. 

Not knowing how to exit a stage? Nothing to see there. 

Forgetting the names of your own Cabinet members? Not a story. 

Having conversations with world leaders who have been dead for years? Totally normal. 

So please, Jake, enough already with the “we were lied to” argument.

Fortunately, this farce is being hammered by conservatives and liberals and almost everyone in between. Things are so bad that a crisis PR expert has been hired, according to Breaker Media. Tapper has confirmed the report. 

As for Tapper’s coauthor, Thompson, his reasoning regarding criticism of their book is almost as comical. “Putting the Lara Trump interview aside … The truth is both Jake and I were covering this,” Thompson said of the duo’s reporting on Biden’s mental health. 

Yes, just put aside that damning interview Tapper did before the 2020 election that was cheered by the media and went viral at the time, they did great. As for Thompson, he did what reporters are supposed to do as a minimum: report the facts without fear or favor. Thompson was awarded the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage for doing a basic prerequisite of the job. “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception,” Thompson said at the White House Correspondents’ dinner last month. 

“Some people trust [the media] less because of it,” he added. “We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows. I say this because acknowledging errors builds trust, and being defensive about them further erodes it.”

Lots to unpack here. For starters, if this was a cover-up of Biden’s cognitive downturn by the White House, it was the worst cover-up of our lifetimes, because everybody saw it. The revelations being hyped in this book aren’t “bombshells” because they only reinforce the obvious truth that we all witnessed well before Biden’s debate against Trump on June 27, 2024. 

Thompson’s claim that every White House “is capable of deception” again makes the hilarious case that reporters believed what the Biden team was telling them without raising any questions. 

Remember, this was the same White House that insisted inflation was transitory or was part of the mythical “Putin price hike.” 

This is the same team that claimed the border was secure. 

It’s the same team that actually accused Republicans of wanting to defund the police. 

And the same team that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was a product of Russia and COVID-19 didn’t come from a lab that literally studies coronaviruses. 

Not exactly a track record of honesty. 

Tapper and Thompson’s Original Sin is on track to be a bestseller when it hits bookstores next week. The authors will profit nicely from it. 

LEGACY MEDIA DISCOVER THAT DEMOCRATS LIE, TOO

But in terms of something that can’t be bought, a thing called integrity, both men can kiss that goodbye. 

Just like most of the rest of legacy media that took part in the worst “cover-up” in modern American history.