Jake Tapper Defends Original Sin from Blizzard of ‘Rage Bait’ Critics

CNN’s Jake Tapper didn’t set out to write a partisan bombshell with Original Sin. But as he told Mediaite founding editor Colby Hall on this week’s episode of Press Club, he knew from the start it would provoke strong reactions.

The idea was born the night before the 2024 election. “I said to Alex [Thompson], ‘I think [Kamala Harris] is gonna lose tomorrow, and when she does, a lot of people will think the original sin was [Joe] Biden running for reelection — and then hiding his deterioration.’” Tapper said. That instinct became the spine of the book.

The book would go on to allege that senior aides concealed signs of President Biden’s deterioration during his reelection bid — a claim that angered loyalists and electrified critics on both ends of the political spectrum.

He and co-author Axios’s Alex Thompson approached the project with urgency and discipline. “Every meal was a source meal,” Tapper said. “We interviewed more than 200 people… It was just nuts.” Their deadline was brutal — a first draft by January and publication by spring. “We captured lightning in a bottle,” he told Hall.

When Original Sin hit shelves in May, the reaction was intense — and unusually wide. Tapper was struck by how divided the backlash was. “Liberal friends of mine had no idea that there were right-wingers who were mad, and conservative friends of mine had no idea that there were left-wingers who were mad,” he said. “People are so siloed now.”

Despite the uproar, Tapper stands by every page. “At the end of the day, the book stands. It holds up, and I’m proud of it.” He rejects the notion that journalists should pull punches for partisan comfort. “The sooner [Democrats] reconcile with the facts of what happened in 2023, 2024, the better for them,” he said. “But they don’t have to listen to me. I’m just a journalist.”

He insisted that journalism’s role is to confront truths others avoid — including the realities of aging leaders. He noted that “people see these politicians declining, and nobody says or does anything,” arguing that “whether it’s [Donald] Trump or Biden or anyone else, there should be transparency.”

What frustrated him most was not disagreement, but selective outrage. “People who only see the decline of people on the other side of the political spectrum have very little credibility on this issue,” he said.

For Tapper, telling that story was never about currying favor. It was about calling something by its name, even if it meant provoking backlash from all directions. In an era defined by partisan denial, Tapper seems less concerned with being liked than with making sure the record remains intact.

Subscribe to Press Club on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Read a snippet of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Colby Hall: Let’s move on to Original Sin because you spent six months in the barrel, so to speak. It was incredible reporting, got a ton of attention. I was struck by the criticism that you received, not just from the right, which was predictable because conservative media loves to do that, but also from the left. I guess the criticism came from the edges, the extremes of the partisan spectrum. To me, that kind of felt like a badge of courage or something that reinforced that you were actually doing something right. Given that time has passed and you’ve had time to react, what are your thoughts on how that landed? It got a ton more attention and probably sold more books as a result, but what was your takeaway from the criticism that you received from both sides?

Jake Tapper: Well, I’m very proud of the book. Alex and I worked really hard. We interviewed more than 200 people. We reported very intensely and feel very good about the content of what we produced. The day before the election, I said to Alex, “I think she’s gonna lose tomorrow, and when she does, there are a lot of people who think that the original sin was Biden running for reelection and then hiding his deterioration.”

And that sparked the idea for the book?

Yeah, and “I’m thinking about writing this as a book, and do you want to write it with me?” It was very impulsive. Alex — I had been a fan of his and had been encouraging CNN to hire him. They hired him as a commentator, and I think he’s a great reporter. He’s 35, so that’s young as far as I’m concerned, and a good kid — really smart and fearless. So it was very impulsive. It was based on the fact that some good friends of mine have hooked up and are working on — like Maggie Haberman is a very good friend of mine, and she and Jon Swan are working on a book on Trump. And she has been talking about what a great partnership it is. It doesn’t make it twice as easy, but it builds on itself. It’s like —

Collaborative. It makes it sort of easier. It’s exponentially better.

Yeah, exponentially though. But that’s what’s interesting about it. It’s not twice as good; it’s exponentially better for whatever reason if you have a good partnership. And Alex and I had a great one.

Anyway, we started working on it. And the pitch was, we want to hand in a first draft at the end of January, and we want this on the shelves in May. That’s us pitching it to publishers. And some publishers couldn’t do that schedule, and we didn’t go with them. We went with Penguin Random House, and it was a sprint. It was just nuts. It was just like every meal was a source meal, and we were constantly sharing our notes with each other and writing. I have a little bit more experience writing books than Alex does, so I knew that structure was a very important thing. At the very beginning, I was outlining the chapters that I thought we should do, and Alex was chiming in and offering his thoughts. And then we were just writing, writing, writing — more than 200 sources.

One of the things that I feel really good about — it obviously sold well, and it got really good reviews — and one of the things that was interesting was when Vice President Harris, when her book came out, she confirmed so many of the things that we had reported already.

I wrote about it, yeah.

Like the Rob Reiner story, but just other things — how they treated her and how Donilon filtered the polling. And she actually, maybe because Alex and I got heat more so than she did, but she said some really tough things about Biden and the decision to run for re-election. She said it was reckless, that he did this without any consultation. She states at one point in the book about how he could not have conducted the campaign, the rigors of the campaign in 2024. And so much was left to her to do.

In terms of the reaction, I think you’re right — it says a lot about the media world that we’re in now. The broad-based world of normies, center left to center right, was fine. They read the book. They appreciated it. Maybe they had some criticisms here or there. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they focused on the reporting. Maybe they thought, oh, there should be a little bit more of this or whatever. We were excerpted by The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and it was generally — that part of it was an amazing experience.

And I kept telling Alex, because this is Alex’s first book — “Don’t think that every book you write is going to debut number one on The New York Times bestseller list. This is an anomaly.” That was my seventh book, and this does not happen. We captured lightning in a bottle, and our timing was great, and everything like that.

Well, you also were first. I mean, you worked hard to be first to market on a story that was going to be told, and you were the first to tell it. And you were able to tell it from a perspective that wasn’t conservative media pointing and laughing at Biden falling off a bike or left-wing media blaming a media cabal that was trying to create a false narrative. So I think you were in a unique position to tell the story, both you and Alex.

Yeah, and one of the things that we wanted to do was — and God bless the other authors who wrote great election books that were about the whole election — but we wanted to write just about this. We wanted to write just about the decision to run for reelection and the decision to hide his decline. So it was very discreet in that sense.

One of the things when Heilemann and Halperin wrote Game Change, which was a huge political book and really good, but it was about the entire 2008 campaign. But when they made it into an HBO movie, they basically just did the chapter on picking Sarah Palin and how that came apart. And again, I’m not taking away from Halperin and Heilemann. That’s a great book, and they did an amazing job. But the focus was, even though there’s lots of great reporting that has nothing to do with Sarah Palin, the focus really was the Palin part of it, in terms of what got the most buzz. And I thought, why not just do that for the Biden story, since the health thing was such a huge part of this?

And we could do — there will be books about the Biden presidency. He’ll write one of them, at least. And they’ll go into policy decisions in Afghanistan and immigration, and inflation, and everything. But that’s not what we set out to do.

In terms of the media reaction, I think that there is a world of media that is now very much focused on rage bait. What’s also interesting is how siloed it is. Liberal friends of mine had no idea that there were right-wingers who were mad, and conservative friends of mine had no idea that there were left-wingers who were mad. People are so siloed now, and that was interesting.

But at the end of the day, the book stands. It holds up, and I’m proud of it. The reaction — that’s not what I do, so it’s tough for me to judge it. I’m a journalist, and I try to cover people in power. I don’t spend my time obsessing about what Fox is doing or what MSNBC is doing. We cover politicians and world events, and so this other world, being content, is certainly an interesting experience.

You had to get — I mean, I would think that, again, you don’t want to curry controversy, but the worst thing is to get ignored, right? Like Kanye West once said on The Breakfast Club a long time ago, “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.” And so there is some benefit to people — even if they’re saying something critical, they’re still talking about your book, and it’s out in the zeitgeist. And I would think that, you know, there’s a lot of double standards. At some point, it had to get under your skin or annoy you a little bit. Or did you have to be zen about the whole thing and say, “This is the business that we’re in?” Hyman Roth —

I love that quote. That’s one of my favorite quotes. “This is the business we’ve chosen.” Absolutely.

And so therein lies the needle that you’ve got to thread — not currying controversy but expecting it, and also realizing that there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve got to let it be water off a duck’s ass, so to speak.

Well, yeah. The Hyman Roth aphorism is true — this is the business we’ve chosen. And Alex and I ran right for one of the most controversial stories in American politics, on a very sensitive issue: somebody’s aging. It was bound to stir up controversy one way or the other. And there are still people who are in denial on the left about what happened and about who did it and whose fault it was. I don’t think — whatever issues the Democratic Party or the progressive movement might have, the sooner they reconcile with the facts of what happened in 2023, 2024, the better for them. But they don’t have to listen to me. I’m just a journalist.

I make an effort to be fair as a journalist, and I see criticism of me that sometimes is completely fair in terms of something I’ll say on my show. I read something — I’m not going to give them the joy — but I read something on a conservative site in the last day, and I’m like, “That’s a good point. I should have said X, Y, or Z. I should’ve, just for fairness’ sake.”

Well, let me say — it’s a high-wire act being on TV, and it’s foolish to think that you’re going to get everything exactly right.

Correct, but also sometimes it’s scripted, and it could be fairer. And that’s on me, and I make an effort to be fair. And so when one is not treated with that same effort, sure, it can be annoying because there’s a lot that is — I mean, look, there are a lot of people who are in this world. We are given these amazing platforms, those of us who are in news media.

Whether you’re a YouTuber or you’re on TV or you have a following on social media, it’s an amazing platform, and you can do with it whatever you want. I choose to use it in a different way than a lot of other people. I think of myself as — I make an effort to provide a fair and engaging news show where we can have both Speaker Johnson and former Speaker Pelosi on the same show. And I don’t think there are a lot of daily shows that can do that. And I try to highlight stories that I think are not getting enough coverage. Sometimes they’re about veterans. Sometimes they’re stories from the left. Sometimes they’re stories from the right.

Your small business tariff series, I thought, is really, really good, because that’s —

Yeah, we need to get back to that. We’ve kind of stopped doing that. We need to do it more because now that they have a 100% tariff on China. But in any case, other people choose to use their platform in different ways. And that’s between them and their god.

So briefly, one of the subtexts of Original Sin is the question of decline and the role of the president. Is the president just the front man who’s surrounded by smart aides?

Right.

I wrote a column, kind of half in jest, but when Trump was going all in on the 51st state candidate thing — it was bizarre, clearly a troll — but he started saying it so much, it was almost as though he —

When he was trying to make Canada a state, right?

Yeah. And I called it — I said he was in a bubble of syncopacy. No one around him was able to say, “Dude, you sound crazy. I know it’s a joke, but you say it so often now, you make it sound like…” And I think there are questions — not that Trump can’t handle himself in front of a microphone, he can — but age and intellectual heft present differently. Do you think Democrats have lost all credibility to criticize what Trump is saying and doing right now? Do we need a national conversation about the cognitive ability of our elected officials?

I think we need to have a conversation about the need for transparency from the White House and members of Congress, and the judiciary in terms of their health. Because right now, there are no requirements for anything. There is a congresswoman, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — you might remember — the House Appropriations Committee, this is just last year. In 2024, the House Appropriations Committee had a chairwoman, Kay Granger, from Texas. She stepped down as chair, and then, a couple of months later, secretly, was checked into a dementia facility in Texas. In Dallas, I think. And a local reporter found that story, and I think people in Congress knew. She was just collecting a paycheck. She and her family were just collecting a paycheck and not doing any work. That district had no member of Congress, essentially, for six months.

And when Marie Gluesenkamp Perez tried to offer an amendment in that committee, she did not get any support for it. And the amendment was just: if people have suspicion that some member of Congress is having acuity issues, this would establish a process by which they could raise that complaint, and it could be looked into — I think by the House Ethics Committee. And nobody would support her. There’s a real reluctance to dive into any of this. I think that’s horribly irresponsible for people to avert their gaze.

We have a chapter in Original Sin about — and it doesn’t excuse anything — but it sets the stage for how often this happens, not on a presidential level, but whether it’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Dianne Feinstein or whoever. People see these politicians declining, and nobody says or does anything because —

Aging politicians isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue. It’s a human issue, right?

Yeah. And they don’t do any —

We all suffer from the same aging condition.

And it’s hidden from the public. Look, my delegate right now here in Washington, DC, Eleanor Holmes Norton — she’s a legend in DC. She’s 88. She is not allowed to drive. There are questions about whether she should be running for re-election, but she’s running for re-election. And it’s a constant in this town. Whether it’s Trump or Biden or anyone else, there should be transparency. And yes, I do think that people who only see the decline of people on the other side of the political spectrum have very little credibility on this issue. I also think that people in the media need to be more outspoken on these issues.

There are also, by the way, members of Congress that you see and think, “Boy, this person is really having a mental health crisis. Is anybody paying attention?” In any case, yeah, all this stuff should be talked about more. I think that right now, the most outspoken Democrat on these issues is, honestly, Kamala Harris in terms of the 2028ers. Because her book — because of what she wrote in her book — that’s harsher than anything I’ve seen anyone else say.