The conclusion of the latest bombshell exposé into the end of Joe Biden’s political career, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, is right in the title.
Reporters Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson dive into the former president’s deteriorating condition and the effort of his family, his staff, and top Democrats to downplay or outright deny it. Many believe the media was also complicit, which is why Tapper, in particular, has been criticized as an imperfect messenger.
Because of his prior coverage of Biden on CNN, some have questioned Tapper’s role in the very “cover-up” he and Thompson allege. Megyn asked Tapper about that critique when he and his co-author joined her Tuesday’s show to discuss the release of the book.
The Critique
Megyn laid out the main critique Tapper is facing from those who long reported on and observed Biden’s decline. “The criticism has been that you are complaining about a cover-up of Joe Biden’s mental acuity that… the right-wing in general saw, that independent media saw and reported on and that was no mystery even to left-wing and so-called mainstream reporters who were not fooled but rather chose willful blindness instead of honest reporting and that you were part of it,” she noted. “How do you respond?”
Tapper called it “a tough and fair question,” but he defended the timeline. “I would say that Alex and I… interviewed more than… 200 mostly Democratic insiders and… almost all these interviews were after the election,” he explained. “And they justified to themselves what they had done in terms of misrepresenting how the president was – not just to me and Alex and other reporters, but also just to each other, and to the world, and to Democrats, and to the Cabinet, etc. – by saying that there was this existential threat of Donald Trump and only Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump. That justified everything in their minds.”
After “that existential threat was over because the election was over and Donald Trump won,” Tapper said, people were “remarkably willing to talk… off the record, or on background, or, in some cases, on the record about what they saw.”
Why Now?
As Tapper explained, one of the main narratives that emerged is that “there were two Bidens.” One was the “fine Biden” who was “serviceable” and “adequate,” while the other version was a “non-functioning Biden” who showed up the night of the disastrous June 2024 CNN debate Tapper co-hosted with Dana Bash. “That non-functioning Biden, according to our reporting, showed up as far back as 2015 after the death of [his son] Beau,” he noted. “All of which is to say that this was a deterioration. This was a progression.”
While Tapper did ask Biden to be be transparent about his health in a 2020 interview while raising the fact that an overwhelming majority of Americans had concerns, he admitted the Biden administration was “not transparent at all” and he himself infamously scoffed at people like Lara Trump who raised the issue of cognitive decline.
“Look, knowing what I know now, obviously I feel tremendous humility about my coverage,” he said. “That Laura Trump interview, for example, she saw something that I did not see at the time… and I own that.”
‘Sense of Humility’
That interview with Trump was in October 2020, but Megyn pointed out that Tapper got another bite at the apple in the fall of 2022 when he interviewed Biden just weeks after the stunning memory lapse in which he publicly asked “Where’s Jackie?” while looking for deceased Indiana Congresswoman Jackie Walorski. Walorski had recently died in a car crash and was honored with a tribute video moments before the incident.
“He promised you that he would be transparent about his health records, and then he wasn’t. When you sat down with him again, about a month after the Jackie Walorski incident, you didn’t ask him about it. You didn’t follow up,” Megyn noted. “He was falling on the [Air Force One] stairs, losing his train of thought regularly, slurring, incomprehensible at times. You sat across from him and didn’t ask him about any of that.”
Tapper defended his approach. “That’s true,” he acknowledged. “But I did ask him about his age, and the fact that the American people had concluded– even though he would say, ‘Whenever they bring up my age, just watch me!,’ I said to him, ‘They are watching you.'”
In Megyn’s view, Tapper could have done more. “But you know as well as I do that there is a way to press on that,” she pushed back. “You could have said, ‘Hey, there’s this poll about your age,’ or ‘You just forgot that Jackie Walorski was dead… [even though] you lowered the White House flags after she died.’ This happened just 13 days before you sat with him. There is a way to press a man like that, and you didn’t do it.”
“That’s correct. I didn’t,” Tapper responded. “And I feel a sense of humility about my coverage. It’s not that I was asking about his favorite movie or color — we were talking about Putin, we were talking about other issues. But of course, I look back on my coverage with humility.”
Tapper suggested that hindsight has proven to be 20/20 for him. “I wish I had covered the issues of age and mental acuity more,” he admitted. “Do I wish that in that 15-minute interview with Biden in October 2022, this was the only subject? Yes, knowing what I know now in May 2025.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Tapper and Thompson by tuning in to episode 1,076 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.