CNN’s adjudicated malicious defamer, Jake Tapper had discovered a new buzzword during his media blitz alongside Axios’s Alex Thompson to hawk their new book about the cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline: “humility.” But SirusXM radio host Megyn Kelly was the first interviewer to hold Tapper’s feet to the fire and grill him on his blatant complicity in helping to mislead and lie to the American people in an attempt to help Democrats hold on to power.
Kelly wasted little time in trying to call Tapper out:
But Jake, the criticism has been that you're complaining about a cover-up about Joe Biden's mental acuity that failed; that right-wing pundits saw, the right-wing in general saw, that independent media saw and reported on, and that was no mystery even to left-wing and so-called mainstream reporters, who were not fooled but chose willful blindness instead of honest reporting; and that you were part of it. How do you respond?
Tapper responded by trying to filibuster, placing most of the onus on White House staffers for misleading him and the rest of the liberal media (Click "expand"):
TAPPER: It’s a – It's a, it's a tough and fair question. I would say that Alex and I, after election day interviewed more than 200 people. 200 mostly Democratic insiders in all these interviews were almost all of these interviews were after the election.
And they justified to themselves what they had done in terms of misrepresenting how the President was, not just to me and Alex and other reporters, but also just to each other and to the world and to Democrats and to the cabinet, etc., by saying that there was this existential threat of Donald Trump and only Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump, and that justified everything in their minds.
After that existential threat was over, because the election was over and Donald Trump won, they were, we found - Alex and myself - remarkably willing to talk to us either off the record or on background or in some cases on the record about what they saw.
One of the things that emerged was that there were two Bidens. One was the fine Biden, serviceable, adequate, and the other one was is a non-functioning Biden, and that's the one we saw the night of the debate. And that's the one we saw some clips of here and there, that you just showed.
And that non-functioning Biden, the one that lost his train of thought in in a significant way, not in the way just that every human loses their train of thought, but in a way that shows that he's having trouble articulating his very views. And the one who forgot the name of close aides, who was not able to come up with George Clooney's name, didn't seem to recognize him. All that sort of thing. That non-functioning Biden was, according to our reporting, showed up as far back as 2015 after the death of Beau; where one top aide said it that that tragedy, the loss of Beau, was like watching somebody pour water on sand. That was the effect on his psyche.
And there were other moments in 2017, 2018, you hear some – The Hur report, one of the reasons he came to that conclusion was because of the recordings they heard of Joe Biden in 2017 talking to his ghostwriter in which he was similarly inclined. Obviously in 2019, 2020, there were other moments like that. Most of his campaign staff and others would say, like, ‘Look, he's 78, he's 79, he has senior moments, but he's fine, he's fine, he's fine.’
Well, he wasn't fine and in – in – throughout his presidency, that non-functioning Biden would show up more and more and more, and he was worse and worse and worse. Really, from deteriorating tremendously, the next time there was a really horrible family incident which was when Hunter Biden's plea deal fell apart in the summer of 2023. And then obviously in June, he was convicted. And the thought, the fear of losing his son, not to jail, but maybe to another, to a relapse, to an overdose, to a suicide, who knows, was a very real fear. And the threat of losing a third child really just diminished him tremendously according to top aides.
So, all of which is to say that this was a deterioration, this was a progression.
“And look, knowing what I know now, obviously, I feel tremendous humility about my coverage. That Laura Trump interview, for example, etc.,” he tried to downplay his part in attempting gaslight voters.
In her follow up, Kelly pointed to the fact that Tapper refused to grill Biden on a series of disturbing instances of his deteriorating mental faculties during his interview with the President 13 days after he called out in search of a dead congresswoman:
KELLY: He promised you he would be transparent about his health records, and then he wasn't. And when you sat with him again, including one month including 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 in the White House lawn. You sat right across from him and you asked none of that, notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you he would be fully transparent about his health issues.
TAPPER: That's true, but I did ask him about his age and the fact that the American people had concluded that even though he said whenever anybody brought up the subject of his age, “watch me.”
KELLY: Yes.
“And like I said, I feel humility about my coverage. I mean, it's not like I was asking him his favorite movie or his favorite color, we were talking about Putin,” Tapper parroted himself. “I look back at my coverage with humility and I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity, but I wish I had covered them much more.”
Speaking for her audience, Kelly said she felt “angry” when watching a video of Tapper yelling at Lara Trump for daring to draw attention to Biden’s lack of mental acuity. “And not only did you not allow her to make her comments, but you, you seem to try to humiliate her. You had a hostility toward the position, but she was totally right,” Kelly declared.
Kelly called out Tapper’s hypocrisy in doing the exact thing in his book that he denounced Trump for:
KELLY: And then you lectured her on how she was in no position to diagnose cognitive decline, which you guys do at length, including on page four of your book. You describe at length his cognitive decline, which is all she tried to do with you, but you had such a visceral reaction to her. And my feeling is that's because you didn't want to hear it.
TAPPER: No, that – I mean if we can – I'm happy to talk about this. I didn't come here thinking that you weren't going to ask me about this. I'm happy to talk to you about it.
As for the source of his hostility to Trump, Tapper blamed Miracle on the Hudson pilot Sully Sullenburger because he “wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, criticizing her about this.” He also argued: “People on the Biden side are saying crazy things about Trump. People on the Trump side are saying crazy things about Biden, including Don Jr. suggesting that Joe Biden is a pedophile. So, that is the larger context.”
In response to Kelly suggesting that Tapper could have worked his sources inside the White House for information, the 30-year Washington D.C. veteran laughably claimed he didn’t have any:
TAPPER: First of all, the Biden White House did not like me. Okay? This is, I do not have great connections with the Biden White House.
KELLY: Well, clearly you got a lot of sources, you say you talked to over 200 sources for this book -
TAPPER: This was after the election.
KELLY: - you have some you could have called and worked.
TAPPER: No. That’s the point. That they were not being honest. That’s the point. That the source
KELLY: Well, how did The Wall Street Journal get it in June of 2024 and Jake Tapper and CNN couldn't find sources for this story then before he dropped out?
While Tapper tried to use one very-late-to-the-game Wall Street Journal report from 2024 to defend the idea that there was at least some legacy media reporting Biden’s decline, Kelly kept the focus on him. “But your commentary on your show, Jake, consistently ran in one direction,” she said. “Occasionally, you would ask tough questions. I mean, here you are on September 2023 saying that Biden was sharp mentally.”
“I've already said, I wish I had covered this more aggressively,” Tapper again tried to wash his hands of accountability.
Kelly also called out CNN for pushing the false Democratic Party narrative that all the videos of Biden’s stumbles and gaffs were so-called “cheap fakes”:
There was a ton of news leading into that debate in that month, and we look back at your coverage and found that you ignored it. Not only did you ignore the Jackie Walorski moment when you had him 13 days later, but you ignored the freeze up that he had at the Juneteenth celebration. You ignored what happened to the G7 when he wandered off and Georgia Maloney, Prime Minister of Italy had to go find him. You ignored the freeze up at the George Clooney LA fundraiser. You didn't cover it. You only covered it after the debate, after George Clooney wrote his op-ed.
Jake, nobody made you do that. There was – Your network, at every turn, was telling us those were quote “cheap fakes,” and you were not combating that narrative. You were – CNN was actively misleading us on what our very eyes were showing us. That's the truth. That's the record.
Possibly to get Kelly off his back, Tapper commended conservative media for being on the ball while he was out to lunch:
And Alex and I are here to say that conservative media was right and conservative media was correct and that there should be a lot of soul searching, not just among me, but among the legacy media to begin with, all of us, for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently. 100 percent. So, I mean, I'm not here to defend coverage that I've already acknowledged I wish I could do differently.
Although, he did end up whining about most the criticism of him and “these clips are not fair.”
This interview was another example of why Megyn Kelly was a worthy recipient of the Media Research Center’s 2025 Bulldog Award for Outstanding Podcast.
To read the transcript click here.
