It’s now been more than a year since Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in what would prove to be his final debate against Donald Trump.
Yet despite Biden ultimately opting not to run for re-election in its aftermath, questions about his cognitive abilities while in office still linger.
That’s largely thanks to Jake Tapper, who recently published “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” alongside his CNN colleague, Alex Thompson. But while Ryen Russillo has yet to finish the New York Times bestseller, he’s admitted that the idea of Tapper authoring such a project has already left him with a sour taste.
“I think Tapper — like a lot of people in the media — to pretend that the rest of us were the a**holes that were like, ‘what’s going on here (with Biden)?’ And then to be the guy that writes the book,” Russillo said during an appearance on The Colin Cowherd Podcast. “Maybe it’s as simple as the publishers going, ‘this is the best.’ Like, ‘let’s get him to write the book, have everybody be pissed about it.’
“And Alex also wrote the book with him. I just wonder if that was a tactical thing, where it felt pretty gross to have Tapper be the guy that’s going to write the book that’s going to set the record straight. I don’t know how much — did Alex do more of the work? That’s the co-author of the whole thing. I just wondered if it was like a publisher’s dream despite the questions.”
While some had raised concerns Biden’s acuity during the latter half of his presidency, many in the mainstream media had seemingly dismissed such questions as partisan attacks. It wasn’t until the now-infamous debate that the subject truly broke through in the mainstream, culminating with Biden exiting the race weeks later.
And yet, Tapper’s book and his heavy promotion of it have kept the story in the headlines a year later. To many — including Russillo — the entire ordeal seems a bit opportunistic, if not hypocritical, with even Tapper himself admitting he has regrets about his coverage of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Obviously, the entire conversation is a nuanced one, and it’s likely that some sources weren’t willing to open up to reporters like Tapper and Thompson until Biden’s reelection efforts had officially ended. Still, Russillo’s skepticism is far from misguided; regardless of the accuracy of Tapper’s reporting, the optics here are certainly odd.