Fresh off the launch of his new book, “Original Sin,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper made the media rounds last week, telling audiences of “shocking revelations” from the former president’s inner circle in covering up Joe Biden’s mental condition and that it was perhaps “worse than Watergate.”
Co-author Alex Thompson discussed an interview with a Biden insider before the election last year who expressed the dominant view within the White House that all Biden had to do was win and “occasionally show proof of life and the people around him would run the country.” Thompson noted, “these were unelected people” who acted without remorse on the basis of their belief that Donald Trump was “an existential threat to democracy” and thus could “rationalize anything, including sometimes doing undemocratic things.”
The assumption of presidential powers by palace aides is more than undemocratic. It’s illegal and perhaps treasonous.
The political world now stands agog at the truth corporate media hid for so long: Biden wasn’t fit, physically or mentally, and he surely wasn’t running the show. Jake and Alex are lamenting that it happened — while rushing to sell the “news” in your choice of hardcover, paperback, or digital. The New York Times calls it “explosive.”
The truth is that the story of Democrats using Biden as a mere figurehead was reported on as early as 2018 by right-leaning outlets, including The Federalist. In August 2021, The Federalist published my piece entitled, “Democrats Got What They Wanted in Joe Biden: An Autopen In the White House.” Just seven months into his presidency, I wrote that Joe Biden was only a president in the technical sense, and that White House and media Democrats had to know Biden was not actually discharging the president’s duties himself.
All of this is now widely acknowledged. Where was Tapper then? Perhaps too busy bashing people like Lara Trump for bringing up the topic years ago. Even in Tapper’s apology to Lara Trump, he conceded that it came only because he had a book coming out.
Thompson recently won the coveted White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual award for “overall excellence.” His publisher boasted that it was “for his exclusive reporting … around Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate: what led to that moment, and what happened afterward that ultimately drove the president out of the 2024 race.”
Not included in that list was any mention of journalism questioning the president’s fitness for office. Yet to buttress his street cred for the new book, Thompson launched into a mea culpa at the awards dinner, admitting that “being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story. And some people trust us less because of it.”
It says a lot about the state of journalism when the profession’s top honoree has to stand in confession for failing to do his job.
Journalists used to be recognized for uncovering previously unknown facts. Tapper and Thompson want credit for missing and even hiding them. Yes, they found religion, the virtue of honest reporting — after the election. In any other profession, resignations happen for such colossal failure.
The “Original Sin” wasn’t the White House cover-up, nor was it being deceived by staffers, as Jake asserts. It was the sin of denial. Corporate media didn’t miss the story. They actively worked to not see it, or worse, to help cover it up.
Jake says that the “big tell” was the hiding of video from a Los Angeles fundraiser last fall. What about the fact that the new president held zero press conferences in his first 60 days in office? And that when he eventually ended up at the podium it was with scripted cards?
Sure, it’s easy to concede now that failing to recognize George Clooney is a problem, but how did Tapper and Thompson miss Biden’s basic inability to speak coherently? They could have known it was not, as Tapper claimed at the time, a “stuttering problem.” Biden’s own campaign material from 1987 proclaimed that he had overcome that issue and was “now one of his party’s foremost orators.” The excuses don’t add up because the signs were always there.
There definitely was “groupthink,” a euphemism for the monolithic leftist views of most of corporate media. When the Wall Street Journal published an article last June entitled, “Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping,” the CNN knives came out. The network’s Oliver Darcy lambasted it, saying “It is difficult to imagine that the newspaper, or any outlet, would run a similar story declaring that Trump is ‘slipping’ behind the scenes based on the word of top Democratic figures …”
CNN did Democrats’ dirty work for them, reporting over the years that “Trump’s gaffes should raise questions about his fitness for office” (2018), “Doctors want President Trump’s head examined” (2018) and brought in his political foes as well with “James Clapper questions Trump’s fitness for office” (2017) and Nikki “Haley questions Trump’s mental fitness” (2024).
When a slew of videos went viral last June showing Biden having difficulty in public events, the Washington Post rushed to explain, “How Republicans used misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24-hour period,” echoing the White House assertion that these videos were “cheap fakes.”
AP’s “news verification reporter,” Melissa Goldin, jumped in as well, telling readers they shouldn’t believe what they see. They were instructed to instead believe that Joe was just enjoying the applause at the L.A. fundraiser, not confused and wandering, because Biden’s campaign said so. And while Goldin’s repertoire this year contains numerous articles finding fallacy in virtually every positive claim made by the Trump administration, there’s nothing yet conceding that she missed the mark on Biden.
Biden’s physician has some explaining to do, under subpoena. Nine months before the latest presidential election, he reported that the president “continues to be fit for duty.” Yet the former president recently announced that he has prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones, a condition doctors say typically takes many years to develop and is easily detected. Was a PSA test done? And why no cognitive test?
Senate Republicans have planned a hearing this month to determine who was running the country and who aided in the cover-up. House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., plans to do the same, saying, “The American people deserve to know when this decline began, how far it progressed, and who was making critical decisions on his behalf.”
Americans deserve to know who was functioning as president. Who was behind the all-powerful autopen? A study by the Heritage Foundation found it was used on virtually all of the documents signed during the Biden administration — legislation, executive orders, and the infamous pardons. The lone exception was the president’s announcement that he was dropping out of the race.
Despite the continuous fervent denial of much of the press, it seems that Americans were indeed governed by an unelected autopen. Joe Biden was just a cheap fake.
Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot. He’s @bobandersonpolitics on Telegram.
