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In a series of posts earlier today, President Trump announced that the U.S. has, quote, complete and total control of the skies over Iran. | |
| We know exactly where the so-called supreme leader is hiding. | ||
| He is an easy target, but is safe there. | ||
| We are not going to take him out, kill, at least not for now, but we don't want missiles shot at civilians or American soldiers. | ||
| Our patience is wearing thin, unconditional surrender. | ||
| This comes as Israel and Iran continue to exchange military blows, which have ramped up since Israel conducted preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. | ||
| Live at the State Department this afternoon, as we wait for spokesperson Tammy Bruce to respond to questions on the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran, among other items. | ||
| While we wait, we'll show you a discussion from our Washington Journal program this morning. | ||
| I guess the morning is the host of CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper. | ||
| Jake Tapper, also co-author of the book Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. | ||
| Jake Tapper joining us from Austin, Texas this morning. | ||
| Thanks for joining us. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| The book has been out several weeks. | ||
| I'm wondering what your reaction has been to the various criticisms from a lot of different sides about the contents. | ||
| I mean, I don't really have a reaction per se. | ||
| The book, my co-author Alex Thompson of Axios, and I, after the election, set out to figure out what just happened. | ||
| What exactly happened that night that we were all so stunned the night of the debate in June 2024, June 27th, to be precise? | ||
| Was that the first time that that adult Joe Biden had ever reared his head as his aide suggested that night? | ||
| What was the decision-making that went on behind having somebody who was so clearly not up to the task of running for president decide he was going to run for reelection? | ||
| So we got to work and we made a list of more than 200 people, Democrats, people who work for the White House and the administration and Congress, donors, et cetera, and talked to as many people as we could to figure out what happened. | ||
| And the result is this book, Original Sin, which goes into what a lot of Democrats feel like was the biggest mistake, which was President Biden deciding he was going to run for reelection, and then the mistakes that followed, which include, of course, the effort by him, his family, and his top aides to hide the degree to which he was cognitively deteriorating, as we saw the night of the debate. | ||
| And the book has been selling very well, and the reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post, LA Times, et cetera, have been very positive. | ||
| And, you know, anytime anybody does anything in this day and age, I don't need to tell you. | ||
| There's going to be criticism from the left and the right. | ||
| But generally speaking, we're really pleased with the reception to the book. | ||
| And I guess it's a follow-up. | ||
| What was the tension between perhaps you and your co-author of collecting this material, holding onto it for a book, but not releasing it previous to the election? | ||
| Well, we didn't start writing the book until after the election. | ||
| So this book was, there was no book until the day after the election when Alex and I got together and started working on the proposal and then started doing the reporting. | ||
| So there isn't anything in this book that we knew before Election Day at all. | ||
| And in fact, I mean, Alex and I often joke about this because I know there's this perception that there are a lot of writers who save the best stuff for after the election. | ||
| I don't know how true that is, but it's certainly not the case for me and Alex. | ||
| And we joke about the fact that like if we had known any one of these, any one of the scoops in the book, for instance, the fact that George Clooney didn't think that President Biden recognized him the night of that June 2024 fundraiser, if we'd known that at the time, any one of us, either one of us would have loved to have reported that at the time. | ||
| But the truth was that President Biden and his family and his top aides convinced the Democratic Party that one, only he had ever beat Donald Trump, which is true. | ||
| Two, therefore only he could beat Donald Trump in 2024, which I don't know is true, but that was their argument. | ||
| And that three, Donald Trump, in their view, posed an existential threat to the nation. | ||
| And so if you convince yourself of those three facts, you can pretty much justify anything. | ||
| And any criticism of President Biden was therefore really kept quiet during the presidential campaign by Democrats because they were afraid that any admission that he was slipping behind the scenes would only help Donald Trump. | ||
| But after Election Day, finally, people that Alex and I had been reaching out to either started returning our calls or our texts or our emails or started being a lot more candid. | ||
| But there's nothing in the book that we knew before Election Day. | ||
| Everything we learned after. | ||
| If you started writing after Election Day, when did you know, what was the moment when you both figured out you were onto something as far as the theme of this book? | ||
| Well, I'll admit that when we proposed the book, we didn't know how much good stuff we were going to get. | ||
| But it was just, I probably, the first few weeks, we would just check back with each other after and share the notes that we had with each interview and realize that, oh my God, it was much worse than we thought. | ||
| And it was, and we traced the first time that President Biden showed some signs of decline, according to a top aide, was 2015, towards the end of his vice presidency with Barack Obama as president. | ||
| And it was just tracking all of the developments as seen through these top aides who felt like this a burden had been lifted that they could be honest about what they had seen. | ||
| As far as sourcing is concerned, one of the critics, and you've probably seen this already, Naomi Biden herself on the book saying it relies on unnamed anonymous sources pushing a self-serving false narrative that absolves them of any responsibility for our current national nightmare. | ||
| What was your reaction to that? | ||
| I mean, Naomi Biden is the president's granddaughter, and she's going to defend her grandfather. | ||
| The Biden family is a very tight-knit family, and they support each other. | ||
| So that removing Naomi from it, because I'm not going to criticize a young woman defending her grandfather, there are a lot of anonymous sources in the book. | ||
| There are named sources as well. | ||
| It's pretty well sourced for anybody who reads it. | ||
| Some of the anonymous sources are, like for instance, we have a number of cabinet secretaries who are identified in the book as Cabinet Secretary number one, Cabinet Secretary number two. | ||
| And I don't, I mean, I imagine that they are remaining relatively anonymous because they don't want to experience the wrath of angry Democrats or the Biden family. | ||
| What is more important, I think, is what these sources told us. | ||
| For example, there are cabinet secretaries in the book who told us that they didn't think towards the end of the Biden presidency that President Biden could be relied upon for that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call in the middle of the night with a national security emergency. | ||
| And that's a rather chilling thought. | ||
| Now, why the cabinet secretaries don't want to go on the record for that, that's probably because they don't want to experience the wrath and the harshness of Democrats criticizing them. | ||
| But it's still, I think, more important than the issue of whether or not of who the sources are and why some of them are anonymous. | ||
| Our guest with us until 845, 202748-8001 for Republicans, 202748-8000 for Democrats and Independents, 202748-8002. | ||
| You can text us questions if you wish at 202748-8003. | ||
| Mr. Tapper, you and your co-author talk about the decline of President Biden, but you also trace it back to after the death of his son Bo Biden. | ||
| Can you elaborate on that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So one of the things that we've learned from talking to top aides is that a lot of the diminishment in President Biden's cognitive ability seems to have come, and this is not unusual, but it seems to have come during periods of real intense stress. | ||
| And obviously Joe Biden is somebody that has withstood a lot in his life. | ||
| It's one of the reasons why his supporters love him so much. | ||
| He's somebody that is able to get off the floor after life throws some of the cruelest twists of fate imaginable. | ||
| In 2015, he lost his beloved son, Bo, the Attorney General of Delaware, to brain cancer. | ||
| And a top aide told us that it was like watching then Vice President Biden's psyche was like watching somebody pour water on sand. | ||
| And that kind of horrific family tragedy really had a powerful, deleterious effect on President, then Vice President Biden. | ||
| We're also told that two of the most intense moments of diminishment, according to top aides, occurred in 2023 and 2024 during his presidency during moments of intense stress for his son Hunter, who I'm sure your viewers and callers know had some legal problems. | ||
| In 2023, he had a plea deal for a gun charge, and that plea deal fell through. | ||
| And then in the summer, in June 2024, he was tried and convicted, Hunter Biden, of that gun charge. | ||
| And what's significant, and I don't say this with anything other than sympathy for the family, but what's significant is that Hunter Biden, who, as we all know, has also experienced tragedy in his family losing his brother. | ||
| President Biden, of course, lost his wife and daughter in 1972 in a car crash. | ||
| The Hunter Biden, in addition, struggles with addiction, a horrible disease. | ||
| And Hunter was very outspoken during the period of 2023-2024, saying that he thought that the Republicans and those who were prosecuting him were trying to drive him into relapse and trying to drive him to suicide. | ||
| And what we ascertained from our reporting is that that fear that President Biden had, a very real, understandable, and tragic fear that he would lose a third child, that he would lose Hunter, that was to a large degree one of the other reasons why his cognitive abilities declined in the summer of 2023 and the summer of 2024. | ||
| And that explains a lot about, in fact, why his performance at the debate was so awful, because that came right after that verdict, the guilty verdict of Hunter in Delaware. | ||
| And also why the decision was so bad and not well thought out because his decline was so significant in 2023, 2024. | ||
| First call for Jake Tapper, co-author of the book Original Sin, is from Susan. | ||
| She joins us from Delaware. | ||
| Republican line, you're on with the guests. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
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Good morning. | |
| Thank you for taking my call, Jake Tapper. | ||
| I've been watching you for a long time, and I do appreciate your work. | ||
| And I will say I'm a Republican, but I have been a lifelong fan of Joe Biden. | ||
| I've loved his passion for people. | ||
| He's had a very compassionate heart for people. | ||
| And I was going to ask you, what was the motivation to even think? | ||
| Why did you think we needed to hear this? | ||
| But then I heard you at the very end say you believe the decline happened from all the stress based upon the fear of losing another son. | ||
| And so I think you answered my question, and I do have now a more open mind as far as even thinking about getting your book, because I've watched your interview previously on C-SPAN where you and your co-author discussed this. | ||
| So if you want to talk more about his fear, that would help. | ||
| But I just wanted to put that out there. | ||
| I was kind of a little closed-minded. | ||
| I was like, no, rejecting any criticism against Joe Biden because I'm such a fan. | ||
| I have such a love for him. | ||
| But now I think you've answered the question. | ||
| But if you could just elaborate more on his fear, I appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for your call and thank you for your open mind. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I want to make clear that people understand this is not a mean book. | ||
| We have sympathy for the horrible situations and the horrible things that President Biden has gone through in his life. | ||
| And I think anybody can sympathize with a father who's watching his son go through something very difficult. | ||
| By the same token, it is a clear-eyed book because this is not just one family's tragedy. | ||
| The decision to run for reelection and then the decision to hide his diminishment were decisions that had repercussions on the entire world. | ||
| There are a lot of Democrats who feel that, not just Democratic voters, but Democratic officials, Democratic strategists, Democratic lawmakers who feel that President Biden should have Abided by his implicit promise to be a one-term president and to be a bridge to the next generation of Democrats, | ||
| and that if there had been a Democratic primary process, then whoever emerged from that, and perhaps it would have been Vice President Harris or maybe somebody else, would have been a stronger candidate and would have had a better chance of defeating President Trump. | ||
| Now, President Trump's team doesn't think that that's true, that he was going to win no matter what, and it's a hypothetical, so we'll never know. | ||
| But it is also true that the decision to run for reelection and the decision to hide his diminishment are decisions that have ramifications for all of us right now as we wake up and try to figure out what is President Trump going to do when it comes to Iran, what is President Trump going to do when it comes to tariffs, what is President Trump going to do when it comes to foreign students, and on and on, all the important issues that C-SPAN callers and viewers absorb every day or discuss every day. | ||
| So I think it is important and I think it's essential that the United States voters understand what just happened and why it happened and how it was allowed to happen. | ||
| Because frankly, voters, when it comes to the incredibly powerful presidency in the United States, I think voters have a right to demand health information about their presidents. | ||
| And Alex Thompson, my co-author, and I feel that we quote a doctor in the book named Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who's an advisor to the White House medical team. | ||
| And he thinks that whoever the White House physician is, that person should have to give the health report that is given annually for a president traditionally, should have to give it under penalty of perjury. | ||
| Now, look, as we all know, no law that Congress passes would apply to the current president. | ||
| So forget President Trump for a second. | ||
| Let's just talk about future presidents. | ||
| Whoever the future presidents are, let's remove Trump and Biden from it right now. |