By Katherine Tinsley
2:43am PDT, May 22, 2025
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Joe Biden's cognitive health was a concern during his 2024 presidential campaign. The topic is the subject of
Jake Tapper's new book,
Original Sin.
Tapper shut down rumors about the then-president's well-being leading up to the 2024 election — which
Megyn Kelly pointed out during a recent interview with him.
Keep reading for the details…
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Joe Biden pulled out of the 2024 election after he struggled during a presidential debate, but Jake Tapper didn't ask the president about his cognitive skills before the event.
"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," Megyn Kelly told Tapper on the May 20 episode of "
The Megyn Kelly Show."
In the summer of 2022, after previously commenting on Walorski's death, Biden publicly called on her during a public conference, indicating he'd forgotten she died. Two years later, he appeared to bizarrely freeze as everyone around him danced during the middle of a Juneteenth celebration.
"You ignored what happened at the G7 when he wandered off and
Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy, had to go find him," Kelly continued, referencing another time Biden appeared unwell that Tapper failed to investigate.
"You ignored the freeze-up at the
George Clooney L.A. fundraiser," she added. "You didn't cover it. You only covered it after the debate, after George Clooney wrote his op-ed [asking Biden to step down]."
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"Nobody made you do that," Megyn Kelly told Jake Tapper. "Your network at every turn was telling us those were, quote, 'cheap fakes,' and you were not combatting that narrative."
"CNN was actively misleading us on what our very eyes were showing us," Kelly alleged. "That's the truth, that's the record."
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Jake Tapper's previous reporting seemingly failed to capture Joe Biden's decline, but the journalist chose to explore the challenges he didn't acknowledge on air in his book.
"I will acknowledge that after I was named moderator, co-moderator of the debate, I tried to make sure that my coverage was fairly vanilla, both about [Donald] Trump and about Biden, because I just wanted to get to the debate," Tapper told Megyn Kelly.
"Frankly, [I'm] surprised that either one of them agreed to have me as a moderator because both sides disliked me so much," he later added.
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Jake Tapper — who previously claimed he doesn't "belong to any political party" — gave credit to conservative media while discussing his own shortcomings in his reporting.
"I remember that moment, the glitch at the immigration event, not getting much attention outside of conservative media at all," he said, referencing a June 2024 instance in which Joe Biden seemingly forgot the name of his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
"[Original Sin co-writer] Alex [Thompson] 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%. So, I mean, I'm not here to defend coverage that I've already acknowledged I wish I could do differently," he continued.
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Jake Tapper also admitted that he apologized to Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, former co-chair of the Republican National Committee Lara Trump, for initially trying to depict her as ableist for asking about Joe Biden's well-being.
Tapper previously implied Trump was mocking Biden's stutter, but he later admitted she was right for asking questions about the president's wellbeing.
"I've already apologized to her," Tapper told Megyn Kelly.
