He wrote the book with co-author, Axios' Alex Thompson, and is promoting it with a straight face as though he and Axios and the rest of the media were not willing allies in abetting every Democrat lie and cover up—and right to the faces of Americans who could so painfully see Biden's decline in real time.
The book, titled, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" purports to be an honest look at how the Democrats covered up and ran interference to keep Americans from knowing how bad Biden's cognitive decline was.
The book's publisher, Penguin Press, issued a press release on the book with this pitch: "What you will discover 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."
The book has received the predictable softball, duplicitous treatment from the rest of the coverup co-conspirators in the media. Truth is relative to ideology and need. And they desperately need to regain some credibility if they want to survive — but not at the expense of ideology.
As an avatar for the media, Tapper gaslit Americans then, but is taking gaslighting to a new level now.
Of the several streams of suicide actively at work in the legacy media is the utter disdain they have for their viewers. Oh sure, they talk to them and praise them like a small child or favorite pet, but that is the precise level of respect they have for them. They will deny this, of course, but their actions scream its truth.
Who can forget Joe Scarborough's infamous dressing down of his audience. Scarborough said on his MSNBC show in March 2024 that he "spent a couple of hours with Joe Biden…going around the world as far as talking issues, talking the economy, talking inflation." With that up close and personal time, Scarborough went into full-scale lie mode: "I undersold him when I said he was cogent. He's far beyond cogent. In fact, he's better than he's ever been intellectually, analytically. Because he's been around for 50 years… Start your tape right now because I'm about to tell you the truth, and f*ck you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second."
Not all media went that far, but they all criticized and challenged Republicans questioning Biden's mental acuity. Simply put, they covered it up. A few weeks later, Biden face planted in the debate with President Trump and the media and Democrats in conjunction changed their coverage to Biden can't run, but how about that Kamala!
People who find more truth on X than in the legacy media streaming statist propaganda into their homes saw the jaw dropping deceit immediately upon Tapper's announcement of his book. "Jake Tapper getting ratioed into oblivion promoting his new book on 'the real story' of Biden's mental decline," commented RealClearPolitics co-founder Tom Bevan. "He really does have utter contempt for his viewers and thinks they're all morons."
More indispensable X users to the rescue: immediately, a 2020 clip went viral showing so-called journalist Tapper lecturing Trump 2020 campaign advisor and daughter-in-law Lara Trump for saying the obvious: Biden was in mental decline. Popular conservative X account "End Wokeness" shared the 2020 clip alongside an image of Tapper's book cover, with the comment, "Tapper then: It's a conspiracy theory to say Biden has cognitive decline. It's a stutter. Tapper now: A book on the cover up."
If the goal is to pull CNN out of its ratings spiral, this book stunt may well have the opposite effect. In fact, it's not clear that CNN, MSNBC, WaPo and others are able to salvage anything like their historic reputations with average Americans. Right and center-right Americans are lost for good, and perhaps the entire center, leaving just the left rump for them to divvy up.
Polls continue to show plummeting trust in the media, with levels sinking to their lowest low in at least a half century—which is as long as it's been tracked. This makes media the least trusted institution in the country, right up there with Congress.
The most recent Gallup survey on the topic, published last week, found that just 31 percent of Americans said they trust the mainstream media either "a great deal" or "a fair amount," while 36 percent said they don't trust the media "at all."
The breakdown in political worldviews tells an even more cataclysmic story. A mere 12 percent of Republicans trust the media and about one-quarter of Independents do. The feeble trust numbers are only held up by Democrats, and their trust is barely over half at 54 percent.
It was not always so. When Gallup began tracking the public's perceptions of the media in the 1970s, only six percent — six! — said they didn't trust the news at all. Nearly 70 percent said they had a great deal or a fair amount of trust. That was when media was limited to newspapers and network news broadcasts.
By 2025, the media has lost all of the political right, most of the center and half of the left. And Jake Tapper's solution is to blame Democrats for covering up what all of us plainly saw and he and the rest of the media lied about, because there is simply no way they did not see what all of the rest of us saw.
Pew Research navel-gazed its way through an analysis of this trust collapse, blaming political polarization, media alternatives and economic challenges, never even considering that being political partisans propagandizing the American people might — just might — contribute significantly to the distrust, to say nothing of the polarization. They even went so far as to suggest that distrust might be an inherently good thing because it means the media is reporting truths people don't like. Really not reading the room, i.e., see Gallup's above breakdown where Democrats are five times more likely than Republicans to trust the media.
This distrust debacle is completely self-inflicted. But to recognize that requires the ability to be self-reflective, and like the party they align with, they appear incapable of locating that skill set.
Rod Thomson is a former daily newspaper reporter and columnist, Salem radio host and ABC TV commentator, and current Founder of The Thomson Group, a Florida-based political consulting firm. He has eight children and seven grandchildren and a rapacious hunger to fight for America for them. Follow him on Twitter at @Rod_Thomson. Email him at rod@thomsonpr.com.
