Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on Explosive Biden Book, Media Cover-Up, and Why The View Won’t Have Them on Air

In their explosive new book, CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson take a deep dive into former President Joe Biden’s mental decline and the shocking ways in which his top advisers endeavored to conceal it as he vied for a second term in office. The co-authors spoke with Mediaite editor Aidan McLaughlin on this week’s episode of Press Club about their book, what they uncovered about this scandal, and the sharply divided reactions to it.

 “There wasn’t a lot of good investigative reporting going on of what was actually happening behind the scenes as the inner circle controlled for [Biden’s] increasing limitations and how it was affecting how he was actually doing his job,” Thompson said about Biden’s mental state and the cover-ups leading up to the election.

It’s not just the Biden administration that participated in the cover up. The media has taken heat for alleged complicity in helping to shield the severity of Biden’s condition from the public. Tapper and Thompson use their book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, as an opportunity to admit that the media fell short in doing that critical investigative journalism as Biden’s issues became more pronounced from 2023 and especially leading up to the election.

One exclusive anecdote from the book took place at a June 2024 fundraising event in Los Angeles when Biden failed to recognize George Clooney himself, despite having a years-long rapport with the famous actor. Tapper and Thompson describe how Clooney, who had last seen Biden in December 2022, was “shaken to his core” by Biden’s decline.

Particularly disturbing, the writers told McLaughlin, was how members of the former president’s Cabinet told them that Biden could not be relied upon to take the proverbial 2 a.m. phone call during a national security crisis.

While Original Sin has been a hot-button topic on Fox News and The View, they are not champing at the bit to speak to the authors directly. Neither has appeared on either the ABC talk show or on Fox’s cable news network.

“We’re glad that they’re enjoying the content and thank them for selling books for us,” Tapper said not long after The View’s Joy Behar ripped into him on-air. “But why would they not want to talk to us about it? It’s perplexing. I legitimately do not understand any intellectually honest argument as to why they wouldn’t. Let’s say they don’t want to book me because I’m on a rival cable channel. OK, so book Alex.”

While neither author has appeared on Fox News this week, a Fox News spokesperson said that Thompson is booked to appear on Fox News Sunday — the network’s broadcast Sunday politics show which airs later on the cable news network — this weekend.

Amid calls from some Democrats to put aside discussions of Biden’s mental acuity in light of news of his cancer diagnosis, Tapper and Thompson told McLaughlin they felt comfortable in proceeding given the relevance of the reporting it contains.

“The book is written as a tragedy,” Tapper said. “It’s a deeply reported book about a man who has suffered a great deal of hardships, who started deteriorating. He and his team tried to hide it as much as possible until we all saw it on debate night in an alarming fashion. This latest news [about his cancer diagnosis], while tragic, doesn’t really distract from the importance of what we as a nation just went through.”

It is proof, he added, that presidents must be transparent about the state of their health — President Donald Trump included.

“Donald Trump has released nothing about his health,” Tapper said. “And we can’t have this as a country. We have such a powerful executive branch, and at this stage, such an un-coequal legislative branch and such weak political parties. We’re really racing towards a very dangerous situation. What if there had been that 2 a.m. phone call for Joe Biden?”

Mediaite’s Press Club airs in full Saturdays at 9 a.m. on Sirius XM’s POTUS Channel 124. You can also subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a transcript of part of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: Jake, some of your own reporting inspired the title for the book.

Jake Tapper: I had been talking to Democrats around the time of the election when it became clear that Donald Trump was going to win. And there were top Democrats who were saying the real problem — the “original sin” — was that Biden should never have run for re-election. And from that, everything else spiraled. So, the cover-up is part of the original sin, because if he had announced that he was not running for reelection, there would not have been this effort to hide what was going on — not to this degree.

You open with Biden waking up the morning after the election. He believes he’s been wronged, and he believes that he would have won had he stayed in the race. As for the people around him, why do they still believe that he could have won and still serve as president today?

Alex Thompson: I think there are three things. One is they just love him. They’ve been with him for a long time; they have complete faith in him. The second is, I think it’s one of those things that to admit the opposite would be too big of a thing to admit, right? Because then you’re admitting that you were trying to install someone in the Oval Office for four more years that couldn’t do it and that you also bear some responsibility for Donald Trump winning. I think there’s something psychological there. And the third thing is something we talk about in the book: People close to Biden talk about what we call this “Biden theology,” the way that he creates this mythos around himself. And the most critical commandment in that is he always comes back. He’ll always perform.

JT: It’s what the American people, even people who don’t like his politics, like about him. He picks himself up and gets back in the fight.

And he has done for decades.

AT: And all those people are the true believers, the zealots, of the Biden theology.

One poll even before the debate, which was a disaster for Biden, showed that 86 percent of Americans thought he was too old to run again, and a vast majority of Democrats agreed. What was Biden hearing from his aides that convinced him that he could actually beat Trump?

JT: Well, one of the issues that we uncovered in the book is that he had these great pollsters — Molly Murphy, Jeff Garren, Jeff Pollock — and they weren’t welcome to talk to him. They didn’t get to talk to him about what they saw and all these polls and the public polls and such. And he would be told — their data would be interpreted by Mike Donilon, Biden’s closest aide, and finessed. In a way that I’m sure Donilon believes, but “Oh, we’re just a couple points behind,” or “Oh, you got elected once before with people thinking you were too old. You’ll get elected once again. Oh, all we need to do is make this a choice between you versus Trump, and then people will come to realize that you’re the candidate. Oh, it’s just Democrats that we need to bring back, and they’ll all come home.”

So, he came into this debate thinking all he had to do was show the world Donald Trump and everything was going to be fine, and that’s one of the reasons why they agreed to a debate in June — really early for a presidential debate.

And quite late at night.

JT: You guys are young. I’m 56, and I’ll tell you, there is nothing in my life that I enjoy more than sleep. It will happen to you, and maybe, if I’m still alive, you’ll call me and say, “I remember when you told me this.”

And I remember thinking, when I walked into the studio that night at 8:50, “This is really late, I’m tired.” And then he hobbled onto the stage, and I was like, “Oh my God, if it’s late for me, what is it like for this guy?”

And I knew about Alex’s reporting from the year before that they scheduled things between 10 and 4. So, in a way, I do also wonder how much the lateness of the evening played a role in how bad his performance was.

The debate comes after the disastrous fundraiser that you guys report on in your book — before which Biden had a series of flights, traveling to a bunch of different countries.

JT: He did the anniversary of Normandy — this is all in June — flew back for his son’s trial in Delaware, flew back, did the G7 in Italy, flew to Los Angeles for the fundraiser. It’s a lot of travel. Not unexpected for a president, but a lot.

You hear a lot of excuses from the Biden folks, and it’s always, “Oh, well, you know, he was traveling so much, and it was really hard.”

JT: Right, you’re not mayor of Dubuque.

But, yeah, that is the job.

JT: Right.

We elect a president to be able to do those kind of things and then be able to perform in public. What happened with his encounter with George Clooney, who he had known for more than a decade, at that fundraiser you report on?

JT: So, George Clooney had known Joe Biden. He’d met him after 9/11, and he’d known him at least since Biden’s vice presidency, when Clooney became a very serious activist against the genocide in Darfur. So, they had a relationship, and then when Biden ran for president, Clooney helped raise some money. Earlier that year, Clooney had helped raise money at a different event.

But, beyond that, they had a relationship. They knew each other more than I know you. This is the second time we’ve met. They knew each other very well, but I would recognize you, is my point.

So, at the fundraiser, Joe Biden walks in, and George Clooney cannot believe how old he seems and how old he looks. He’d seen him in December 2022, but as we write in the book, there’s a serious decline in 2023. Anyway, so Biden walks in, and he has an aide and he’s just walking around saying, “Hey, how are you doing? Thanks for being here. Hey, how are you doing, thanks for being here.” And an aide brings him over to Clooney and says, “You know George,” and Biden’s like, “Yeah, hey,” and it dawns on Clooney and at least one other witness: Joe Biden does not recognize George Clooney.

And this is not George Clooney with black hair dyed for the play on Broadway. This is not George Clooney with a beard. This is George Clooney looking like George Clooney, one of the most recognizable faces in the world. And somebody that he has known for more than a decade. And then the aide says, “George Clooney,” and Biden’s like, “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” and that shocks Clooney to his core.

But beyond that, Biden’s performance backstage at these smaller clutches for the big, big money donors is really disturbing to a lot of people who see it, including President Obama and other people who I talked to who were there, because he is addled. He can’t finish his thoughts, he can’t finish his sentences. So it’s beyond even just that one encounter with Clooney. There is a bunch of stuff that goes on backstage. And then on stage, it’s a little better, but to a lot of Democrats, it is really still upsetting.

I saw — I’m not sure who it was, but somebody denied that reporting, or at least pushed back on the Clooney stuff?

JT: You’re telling me that the people who lied about Biden’s acuity throughout his presidency and were told they could no longer hide it from the country are still not being honest?

What surprises me, about those Biden dead-enders, let’s call them —

JT: Ride or die.

This stuff was all quite obvious publicly. I mean, we saw Biden. He had seriously declined. Even before the debate, there were plenty of moments when he was out in public and was obviously too old to be president. So when I hear these denials, I’m always a little bit baffled because him not recognizing George Clooney is not surprising at all. And I am not going to guess who your sources are on that but —

JT: I have good sources. I have good sources.

The broad premise of the book is that there was this cover-up, with actions taken by the White House to hide Biden’s infirmity. That’s obviously a big charge. It’s gotten a lot of scrutiny. What is the evidence in support of it?

AT: You watched the debate, right? Were you shocked?

Shocked at the spectacle, not surprised that he was old enough for something like that to have happened.

AT: Got it. But a lot of voters were.

Yes.

AT: And the reason why voters were is because — even though they saw that he was aging — the White House was managing him to ensure that debate Biden was not shown to the public. And, over time, the ratio of sort-of-functioning Biden, non-functioning Biden, began to change. And also, non-functioning Biden got worse.

And the White House took steps, especially starting in 2023 throughout 2024, to hide that Biden from the public. And then basically it became so unpredictable and their luck ran out. And that’s why we call it a cover-up because they were clear. We, I think, extensively show that the Biden we saw in the debate stage — there were many instances of that behind the scenes. Also just listen to the tapes, right? Of the Special Counsel, listen. And that sounds a lot like debate Biden in a lot of ways, right?

JT: Don’t forget the White House staffer who resigned.

AT: And we also have a senior White House official who resigned in early 2024 because they didn’t think he should run, who loves Joe Biden.

JT: Almost all of our sources love Joe Biden. This isn’t about that.

It’s not a hit piece from Trump administration officials.

AT: And they love Joe Biden. But they said that they were intentionally shielding him, not just from the public, but also from other staffers. And from cabinet members, from other senior White House officials, because they did not want many people to see the extent of the decline.

One of the arguments that you hear from your sources is that Biden’s decision-making wasn’t affected but his ability to communicate to the public was.

JT: Yeah, that’s what the Biden people say. They’ve lowered the bar so much in their statement. They don’t really dispute any of the facts in our book or the issue about, is he too old? Does he lose his train of thought? Is the Biden that we saw at the debate actually Joe Biden? They don’t really dispute that anymore. It’s just like, well, you can’t point to a mistake he made because of that.

Like he’s a chat bot who is very effective at spitting out policy.

JT: But I would also take issue with that. First of all, that’s really lowering the standards, but OK, fine. He made the decision to run for re-election. That’s a disastrous decision. He made the decision to cover up his decline as much as possible. That’s disastrous.

But beyond that, we have members of Congress talking about his inability to do his job. As far back as 2021, he goes to speak before the House Democratic Caucus. He’s supposed to tell them to — and this is really wonky — back this one piece of legislation. He doesn’t do it. They bring him back again to do it, he doesn’t do it again. OK, so that’s a small thing, and some people interpreted it charitably at the time, like maybe he’s just being cagey, he’s being a cautious politician, maybe he actually sides with the progressives in this, whatever.

We have two U.S. Senators in the book, Biden backers. Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has a conversation with Biden in October 2023 about terrorists that the Biden team is about to release from Guantanamo to Oman. And people are very concerned about that, not just Warner, but lots of Democratic senators and Republican senators, because they fear that these people are going to just join the fight. Hamas has just attacked Israel. They worry, you’re just letting some jihadis back into the fight. He has a conversation with Biden. He doesn’t think Biden has any idea what’s going on. He doesn’t understand this discussion.

Fast forward to June 2024: Senator Bennett of Colorado goes to the White House for an immigration event. Biden has that horrifying glitch moment where you can’t really even understand what he’s doing. He does that thing, just like as a tool, he whispers when he wants to emphasize something. But this isn’t that. This is like some sort of glitch, and neurologists we talked to said this looked like a neurological event. Bennett leaves that event at the White House thinking, “Well, this is why our immigration policy is such a mess. The president cannot manage the portfolio. He’s not able to manage these competing interests and direct people as to what to do.”

And in fact, the DHS Secretary thought that, at the beginning of Biden’s term, that there was going to be an order given by the White House to try to shut down the border and do more border security. That order never happened. So, it never created any decision-making errors? I would take issue with that and so would Democratic senators.

It’s sort of unfalsifiable. Would he have made a better decision if he were 20 years younger?

AT: I’ll just to add to that: I remember talking to a member of the cabinet who said, they felt that if he’d been 20 years younger, the administration would have been run differently. It empowered the people immediately below him, in particular Ron Klain, those first two years, who was more progressive than Joe Biden. And I think a lot of long-time Biden people were surprised that he really embraced the progressive caucus in the way he did those first two years. Given his long record as, basically, a centrist.

I mean, this is a guy that once ran on a balanced budget amendment, right, and the crime bill, and everything else. To your point, it’s unknowable and unfalsifiable, but there are members of the cabinet that felt, if he had been younger, he would have been more in the weeds and that top-tier would have not had as much power.

JT: Cabinet officials told us that by the end of his presidency, Joe Biden could not be relied upon for that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call during a national security crisis. Now, the fact that there wasn’t a call like that, I’m glad.

It should be the bare minimum to be available for a 2 a.m. call.

JT: I’m glad that that emergency didn’t happen. That is not a justification for what they did.

I was speaking to a former Obama Official a few weeks ago and they said Biden sees it as the Israel of Golda Meir, whereas now it’s the Israel of Ben Gvir.

JT: I think it’s the same with the Soviet Union and Putin, although there’s probably more of a similarity between Putin and Khrushchev than there is between Golda Meir and Netanyahu. But yeah, I think a lot of his core memories were formed in the ’70s and ’80s.

AT: There’s wisdom that comes with age, right? But yes, I think some people believe that he was stuck in amber at a certain point.

What do you two make of the argument that the media was complicit in this cover-up?

AT: Obviously, I believe that the media fell short.

JT: Including us. I mean, I would defend Alex because I think Alex was a very aggressive White House reporter, breaking a lot of stories for Axios on this issue. But even Alex would agree that what we uncovered, whence Democrats were willing to talk about this after the election, shocked us.

AT: And it made me realize that, even though I covered it aggressively, I was missing some of it. I want to make a distinction here because it’s not like age was not talked about, obviously.

JT: Usually as a political liability and not “can he do the job?” by the legacy media, not the conservative media, which was talking about that.

AT: And I would say, yes, exactly. It was a lot of horse race coverage and, “Oh, look, he stumbled, blah, blah, blah.” But there was not as much coverage about what was going on. There wasn’t a lot a good investigative reporting going on of what was actually happening behind the scenes as the inner circle sort of controlled for his increasing limitations and how it was affecting how he was actually doing his job.

And so, I get when Biden people, Democrats, are like, “You talked about it endlessly.” When we say the media fell short, we’re talking about sort of that type of investigative work.

JT: There were, of course, exceptions to that. Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey from The Wall Street Journal and others trying to do as much as they could, trying to break as much as they could.

But, if you go back and read that [WSJ] report, it comes off as pretty limited in what it was able to expose.

JT: I don’t blame them at all because, having gone back and re-reported one of the things that they broke, which was this January 2024 meeting about Ukraine where Biden was very addled in the meeting, we were able to get House Democrats to at least talk to us as House Democrats. I don’t know their sourcing. I have tremendous respect for Annie and Siobhan. I don’t know their sourcing.

I imagine they talked to some of the same people who wouldn’t even talk to them on background at all. So, this was one of the other problems, and this is why — look, the media, obviously, we could have done more. I could have done more, I mean, and I feel like I’ve discussed that at length, but beyond that, you have an entire Democratic Party apparatus either not telling us the truth or actively lying.

AT: Just to put a fine point on it, several of the Democratic senators that attacked the Wall Street Journal reporters, just weeks later after the debate, were being like, “Oh yeah, we’ve seen him.”

JT: Oh, worse than that. So, I’ll talk about two of them by name, Senator Patty Murray of Washington State and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Both of them put out statements, I assume that they were asked to do so by the White House, taking issue with the Wall Street Journal report. I forget who exactly attacked the reporters, but there were people attacking the reporters, too.

We have this in the meeting that the Democratic senators had with the Biden inner circle after the debate when it was only three to five Democrats still backing Biden, although only one Democratic senator ever publicly called for him to step down, only one in the whole in the whole saga, Peter Welch of Vermont. Only one and only one Democratic governor called for him to step down, Maura Healey of Massachusetts. When you think about what everybody saw and the fact that only one senator and only one governor, that’s crazy.

But in any case, behind the scenes, Jack Reed who was, days before, talking about how great Biden was in that Ukraine meeting, saying that the Biden campaign should make him submit to an examination by two neurologists and have it go out there and Patty Murray saying basically something to the effect of, “His legacy is on the line, he should step down” days after hurting Annie and Siobhan.

I think audiences expect the media to cover presidential elections as binaries where both candidates are given equal scrutiny and are covered in the same way. Trump made that very hard for everyone because the last term ended with January 6th, when he tried to overturn an election. He attacks the free press a lot and is not particularly fond of the rule of law. So I think Democrats view something like Biden’s age as trivial when compared to the threat of re-electing Trump.

JT: It’s the “but her emails” argument.

Right, exactly, and I think it’s hard for audiences to understand that you still have to cover both things. They’re both newsworthy, but journalists make decisions all the time about how to weigh how much to cover certain topics. Do you think that part of the reason why the media, including yourself, was not as aggressive as you would have liked on the subject is because you agree to a certain extent with that argument that the threat that Trump poses is greater than Biden slouching towards infirmity?

JT: I don’t think that applies to us, but I certainly think that that’s a valid argument about newsrooms writ large.

AT: I think some did, but I don’t believe — I don’t agree with that.

JT: The argument that we should not have covered an FBI investigation into a former secretary of state who set up a home server so she could elude oversight — the fact that we covered that is completely defensible. You could argue about scale and ratio and all that, but of course we’re going to investigate that and of course we’re going to cover Hillary Clinton’s email server, of course.

AT: Just to add a point, it was the Democratic Party that nominated someone under FBI investigation, and then the FBI reopened the investigation a week before the election. I think people want to blame the media. I guess you can say, “Can you talk about scale?” But what did you expect us to do? And, also, do these people think that Trump is under-covered?

I love when people complain about placement on A1 of The New York Times as if anyone reading The New York Times is undecided in their opinion on Trump.

AT: Some of these critics — drives me nuts — if they were put in charge of The New York Times, I think somehow they are convinced that Donald Trump would not win, right, and I don’t see any evidence of that being true.

Some of the criticism of this book comes from Democrats. I’m not sure if you guys saw Joy Behar on The View yesterday.

JT: I have been on that show to talk about my novels in the past and they talk about — the same with Fox News, by the way — they talk about our scoops, they talk about our book. They will not book us to talk about it. Fox News and The View. Neither of them.

I’m shocked at both because Fox News has been covering this relentlessly.

AT: We know.

JT: We’re glad that they’re enjoying the content and thank them for selling books for us, but why would they not want to talk to us about it? It’s perplexing.

Fox and Friends is a real bookseller, I’ve heard.

JT: Is that true?

I hear that it’s one of the best for selling books.

JT: I legitimately do not understand any intellectually honest argument as to why they wouldn’t. Let’s say they don’t want to book me because I’m on a rival cable channel. OK, so book Alex. Right. Why do you not want to talk about this?

I think Sean Hannity would book you guys, whether it’s on radio or on the network.

AT: We’ve tried. We have a very good publicity team at Penguin, and they have tried.

I’m guessing it’s because they don’t want to promote anyone else having covered this story, even though you guys actually did the reporting.

JT: Well, that’s one of the things that’s interesting. Like, we give credit to conservative media, including several of the people you just mentioned, for being right about this story. And we say that the legacy media did not rise to the challenge of covering this as the story should have been, with exceptions, of course.

What we have done here in this investigation is different from airing a clip of Joe Biden tripping at the Air Force Academy commencement. I’m not denigrating that. I covered that, too. That is important. That is a data point. And it should be covered.

But I would argue him not recognizing George Clooney behind the scenes is more important. And that the investigative journalism that we did, and believe me — I mean, Alex, either one of us would have given an arm to have broken the George Clooney story back when it happened. We’re all wired the same way. We’re journalists for a reason. We want to beat the other guy. We want it to be the first one to share this accurate information. We would have loved to have broken it back then.

AT: They clearly agree that it’s newsworthy because they keep talking about all the news in it.

This is my very tedious and unending criticism of the independent media, if you want to call it that, that they relentlessly criticize the traditional press but then use its reporting.

JT: All the time.

One of the things that I’ve been criticized for not covering — there was that moment in 2022, I think, when Biden called out for a congresswoman Jackie Walorski who had been killed in a car accident weeks before. And I’ve been criticized for not covering that.

And one of the people on my staff went back and looked: Why didn’t I cover it? Because Hurricane Ian was converging on Florida. And our coverage that week was 100 percent hurricane coverage, which is something else that we in the quote-unquote legacy media do that the independent media don’t necessarily — well, I mean, there are weather people that are incredible, and I’m not talking about them, but they’re not covering that. That’s not clicks for them, and they don’t have the apparatus and the infrastructure. So, it’s just interesting because we have — it’s just different, we have different jobs.

That was a big part of your Megyn Kelly interview. She spent a good chunk of the interview taking you to task for your coverage of Biden. What did you make of that interview?

JT: We didn’t walk in there thinking that Megan was going to — look, she does her thing and we were just there to talk about the book. We have said it to you, just minutes ago, that we think that the legacy media in general fell short covering this, with exceptions. I have no problem acknowledging that.

I don’t understand, this seems to me like something that any journalist who is intellectually honest would admit. Like, I wish I had covered weapons of mass destruction more skeptically back in 2002. I mean, like, of course, with hindsight, you can always say, boy, my gut was telling me X, but for whatever reason, I didn’t do it. I mean I don’t know any reporter who, you know, over a drink wouldn’t admit that.

So I just think, if we in the media — and Alex said something like this when he was honored with the White House Correspondents Association Award for his Biden coverage — if we in media can’t just own up to some of this, why would we expect politicians to do it?

Did you get a lot of shit for that White House Correspondence Association speech? Did people complain about it to your face?

AT: I mean, reporters aren’t always the most direct and also just like, you know, shit-talking, whatever. I think even Dylan Byers at Puck reported that it didn’t go over well in the room.

JT: He called it sanctimonious.

AT: But he also said I was right. I don’t know, I just did it because, honestly — especially given what I already knew was in the book — I felt odd about winning an award for something that I felt we could have done better on, and I guess I just felt like I had to say something. I don’t know, and so I have no idea. I felt good with myself afterward, and I don’t think I would have if I hadn’t said something.

One of the things that you’ve had to contend with, Jake, is video clips going around of your coverage from the campaign. There’s one in particular that went viral and it got cited in the Wall Street Journal editorial board and it has some misleading edits in there that make it seem like you were covering for Biden.

JT: It’s really wild, right? Like, I’ll say, “The Washington Post is reporting X,” and all they clipped is the X.

What’s interesting about that is not the fact that there are bad faith actors on the internet. And look, the Lara Trump interview, and I feel like I’ve covered this — this has been covered adequately — that’s a fair hit. That’s a fair hit on me.

But those other clips, what’s surprising is not that there are bad faith actors out there. It’s that Fox, Ted Cruz, The Wall Street Journal just shared them. And when it was pointed out by book publicists, “Hey, this is not accurate,” they don’t care. There’s no correction, no taking it down, no admission of, “hey, we shouldn’t have done that.”

And let’s keep in mind what they’re doing here: They’re criticizing the media, they’re criticizing me, and they’re doing so in a way that is not accurate. So, I mean, it is what it is, but it’s interesting to be in the middle of this tornado. It’s just kind of like the New York Post quoting Hunter Biden, like the newspaper that broke the story of the Hunter Biden laptop, to their credit — I give them credit for that — now considers Hunter Biden a reputable source. It’s really interesting to be in the middle.

AT: It’s interesting to watch him. I’ve been a smaller tornado where he’s in this bigger one. He’s a bigger target they’re going after, and you know, the Tapper book is good clickbait, right?

It was announced that Biden was diagnosed with cancer this weekend. Some Democrats, including CNN contributor David Axelrod, say that the conversation around his mental acuity should be quieter over the next couple weeks, which I think is an argument we heard when John McCain was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. I never found that to be a particularly convincing argument. If anything, we should talk more about it. Did that give you pause about continuing to promote the book?

JT: First, I’m sure it goes without saying, and I’ve said this many times, we all send him our best wishes and our prayers. Cancer is a horrible disease. Obviously, it gave us pause. We’re humans, and there is a discomfort when talking about somebody who is going through anything like this.

That said, the book is written as a tragedy, [but] it’s not a mean book. It’s just a deeply reported book about a man who has suffered a great deal of hardships, a great number of hardships in his life, who started deteriorating. He and his team tried to hide it as much as possible until we all saw it on debate night in an alarming fashion.

This latest news, while tragic, doesn’t really distract from the importance of what we as a nation just went through and also the fact that A, as evidenced by this conversation we’re having right now about this news of his cancer, these are very uncomfortable topics to discuss. They’re very sensitive discussions for reporters and for people we’re trying to cover. It’s very uncomfortable. B, there needs to be transparency by leaders when it comes to their health. And I would argue that some of the skepticism we’ve heard from Democrats, Republicans and doctors — I have no idea what’s true, what’s not true — all I can say is that lack of confidence in the transparency that’s being offered didn’t come out of nowhere. C, this applies to Donald Trump, too. And every future president. Donald Trump has released nothing about his health. And while there aren’t the [same] questions of acuity, there are certainly questions about his health.

And we can’t have this as a country. We have such a powerful executive branch, and at this stage, such an un-coequal legislative branch and such weak political parties. We’re really racing towards a very dangerous situation. What if there had been that 2 a.m. phone call for Joe Biden?

And I think people often make the mistake of assuming that reporting has the intention to advance a certain political project. And that’s not the point of reporting. The point of reporting is to expose the truth and tell history for posterity, which I think you guys have done a very good job of with this book.

Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, is out now. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, thanks for coming on Press Club.