Jake Tapper’s book tour just ran headlong into a wall named Megyn Kelly.
The conservative journalist grilled Tapper, co-author of the upcoming tell-all publicizing just how dysfunctional the Biden administration became behind the scenes, after he tried to separate himself from past on-air defenses of the elderly ex-president.
“Knowing what I know now, I feel tremendous humility about my coverage,” said Tapper, citing his Lara Trump interview where he dismissed her claim that Democrats were covering up Biden’s mental decline. “She saw something that I did not see at the time. A hundred percent.”
After listening to Tapper drone on about the limited pushback he gave President Biden, Kelly had heard enough and cut him off.
“He promised you he would be transparent about his health records, and then he wasn’t, including one month later when you sat with him again, one month after the Jackie Walorski thing… You didn’t ask him about it. You didn’t follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs, that he was losing his train of thought regularly, that he was slurring, that he was incomprehensible, that he was getting lost on the White House lawn,” she interjected angrily.
“You sat right across from him and you asked none of that!”
Tapper tepidly replied that he once asked Biden “about his age” and his infamous “watch me” reply whenever the issue of Americans’ concerns about his fitness was raised by a reporter.
“And I said ‘They’re watching you, and you’re too old for this job,’” he said.
More unsettling to Kelly was watching Tapper fail to ask Biden why he thanked Walorski, a former congresswoman, in that speech a month after she died.
“You know as well as I do that there’s a way you can say ‘hey, there’s this poll on your age,’ or you could say ‘you just forgot that Jackie Walorski was dead. You asked where she was moments after watching a videotape tribute to her. You lowered the flags at the White House after she died.’ This happened thirteen days before you sat with him,” Kelly exclaimed, dressing down the veteran CNN anchor.
“This is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and the audience, and you didn’t do it,” she added.
To his credit, Tapper responds with a few more references to the tremendous “humility” he feels now that he’s about to pocket a fortune peddling the exact narrative he worked to discredit before Biden dropped out.
“I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity better, and I wish I had covered them much more,” mustered Tapper.
For more than six minutes, Kelly goes on, educating Tapper about the impropriety of “running cover” for Biden while he softly pushes back.
Criticism of Tapper’s mea culpa tour was even more pointed online as social media users revisited clips of him blaming Biden’s misstatements on a “childhood stutter” or insinuating Lara Trump was guilty of promoting conspiracy theories.
A CNN spokesperson told the NY Post last week that Tapper reported “fairly and accurately” on Biden at the time.
“Jake Tapper is a veteran journalist whose tenacious and thorough reporting has held those in power to account on both sides of the aisle for decades,” the spokesperson said.
“From the campaign in 2020 to 2024 when he dropped out, Jake raised concerns about President Biden’s mental stamina on his shows, questioned Biden officials directly about his health on air, and consistently encouraged open discussion and debate on the issue.”
