When Lara Trump told Jake Tapper on CNN that she was concerned then-candidate Joe Biden was suffering from cognitive decline just weeks before the 2020 election, he scolded her and accused her of “mocking” his stutter.
Tapper has been forced to revisit that viral exchange in the wake of the release of his new book Original Sin with Axios’ Alex Thompson that chronicles – you guessed it – Biden’s cognitive decline and the efforts to cover it up.
Given his new reporting, Megyn asked the CNN anchor if he wanted to apologize to Trump when he came on The Megyn Kelly Show earlier this month to promote the book, and he said he already had via a private phone call. Trump has now offered her side of the story, and it left Megyn with more questions than answers.
On Thursday’s show, Megyn was joined by Glenn Greenwald, host of Rumble’s System Update, to discuss the ‘apology’ and Tapper’s unconvincing contrition about getting the story so wrong for so long.
Lara Trump Responds
When Megyn asked Tapper if he wanted to “apologize” to Trump, he said he already had. “I’ve already apologized to her. I called her months ago,” he shared. “After we did the research for this book and I realized how bad his acuity issues were… I called Laura Trump and I said, ‘You were right.’”
He said he would not reveal the contents of their private conversation, but he acknowledged “her comments have aged well” and his have not. “My comments have aged poorly. I own that,” he told Megyn. “Knowing what I know now, obviously I feel tremendous humility about my coverage… She saw something that I did not see at the time… and I own that.”
Trump is now a Fox News host and she was asked about Tapper’s apology when she went on Laura Ingraham’s show Tuesday night. “Jake Tapper called me about two months ago actually, and he said, ‘I have this book coming out, and I know everybody’s saying I should apologize to you. I plan, whenever the book comes out, to go on TV and I will say you were right and I was wrong,'” Trump explained. “And I guess, to Jake’s credit, he did that.”
In her view, however, an apology cannot change the fact that “the damage is done” and the country had to endure an open border, questions about who was actually running the government, and more as a result of Biden winning the 2020 election – never mind running for reelection before dropping out in 2024.
“Jake Tapper saying this is a Watergate-type situation now that he played a role in it, it feels a little bit too late to me,” she added. “I do appreciate that he did keep his word though and come out and say that I was right.”
Did He or Didn’t He?
When Ingraham pressed as to whether an apology actually happened over the phone, Trump said “he called me and said he was going to do this and here we are.” That prompted Ingraham to declare the situation “convoluted.”
Megyn was inclined to agreed. “Did he actually say, ‘I’m sorry,’ or did he just say, ‘When my book hits, I’m going to say that the right was correct,'” she asked. “I am now less sure than I was before that an actual apology was issued.”
Whether those words were uttered or not, Greenwald said a phone call is not sufficient in this situation. “If you go on the air or in a column or whatever and you accuse somebody of something truly terrible like bullying kids with disabilities – which is what he accused her of – you don’t call her privately and sort of say, ‘Hey, you were right,'” he explained. “You go on the air and you say, ‘I said something terrible. It was completely baseless. I apologize to Lara Trump.'”
False Humility
While Tapper claimed Trump “saw something that I did not see at the time,” he has subsequently suggested that he was duped because the Biden White House wasn’t being honest.
“And I think that we need to be skeptical of everything that we are told by people in power. And I mean that obviously should be the mantra of being a journalist to begin with. If your mother tells you she loves you, get a second source,” Tapper said on PBS last week. “But we just need to remember that. Like, politicians lie. White Houses lie. Power is an aphrodisiac, and we just need to all remember that and not take at face value anything that we’re told.”
Greenwald said the exchange, which also involved The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg, was embarrassing. “Watching a person who is 56 years old, who has been in… journalism for 30 years, be asked by Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘What is the lesson that we are all supposed to take from this?’ And then he says – as though it was the most profound insight – ‘We really have to remember that people in power lie… and, therefore, we can’t take what they say at face value.’ If I were to teach a journalism course to eighth graders, that would be the very first thing I would emphasize on the very first day,” he noted.
As he explained, it is hard to believe “Jake Tapper just woke up,” but he thinks the framing is part of a larger strategy. Tapper and Thompson reportedly hired a crisis PR firm to help them navigate the book launch, and Greenwald said he sees those fingerprints are all over the authors’ media tour – beginning with their appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show.
“[Tapper] kept using this phrase with you… ‘I look back on my coverage with some humility.’ This is the kind of thing that they tell you to say so that you seem like you’re taking accountability even though you are absolutely not,” Greenwald noted. “Like, what does that mean? You were the one who helped to lead the cover up that you are now… making millions of dollars off of exposing. It is a huge scandal.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Greenwald by tuning in to episode 1,083 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.