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CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Tuesday admitted during a pointed exchange with Megyn Kelly that he apologized to Lara Trump for dismissing her concerns about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline during a viral 2020 interview.
Tapper told Kelly he felt “tremendous humility” about his past coverage of the former president while plugging his forthcoming book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” on her podcast.
In the book, Tapper and co-author Alex Thompson, a CNN contributor, detail how Democratic insiders shielded Biden’s condition from public view because they feared a second Trump term.
“She saw something that I did not see at the time — 100% — and I own that,” Tapper said of Lara Trump during the tense interview on “The Megyn Kelly Show.”
Pressed by Kelly on whether he had apologized, Tapper replied, “I already apologized to her. I called her months ago.”
He said the conversation “went well” and that the president’s daughter-in-law clarified she never meant to mock Biden’s stutter.
“After we did the research for this book and I realized how bad his acuity issues were, I called Lara Trump and I said, ‘You were right,’” Tapper said.
His mea culpa was about four years too late. In a 2020 CNN interview with Lara Trump, Tapper abruptly ended their conversation after airing a clip of her making a joke about Biden’s halting speech.
“Joe, can you get it out, let’s get the words out, Joe,” she said in the clip.
Tapper accused her of mocking a disability: “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?”
Lara Trump pushed back, saying, “First and foremost, I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter. I think what we see on stage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very clearly a cognitive decline.”
Tapper fired back: “I think you were mocking his stutter. I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”
Following news of Tapper’s book, Lara Trump reignited criticism of the exchange.
“Seems like a good time to remind everyone that in 2020 Jake Tapper, first, accused me of making fun of people with a stutter (an atrocious accusation) and then attempted to shut me down and ended our interview when I tried to warn people of Joe Biden’s very obvious cognitive issues,” she posted on X earlier this year, sharing the 2020 footage alongside screenshots of headlines about media mistrust.
Critics across social media have accused Tapper and CNN of hypocrisy, saying they were complicit in downplaying Biden’s fitness until politically convenient.
The Post has sought comment from Lara Trump.
During his interview with Kelly, Tapper said the cover-up extended well beyond the press.
He and Thompson interviewed more than 200 Democratic insiders, many of whom admitted they downplayed Biden’s condition due to fear of a Trump victory.
“They justified everything in their minds,” Tapper said. “After the election, they were remarkably willing to talk to us.”
According to Tapper, aides described “two Bidens” — one competent and one visibly impaired.
He added that signs of deterioration appeared as early as 2015, after Beau Biden’s death, and worsened after Hunter Biden’s legal troubles.
During their exchange, Kelly repeatedly pressed Tapper on why he failed to confront Biden about his apparent cognitive issues following a widely publicized gaffe involving the late Rep. Jackie Walorski — the Republican congresswoman who died in a 2022 car accident alongside two of her staffers.
Weeks after the accident, Biden asked “Where’s Jackie?” during a White House event — despite having publicly mourned her death a month earlier. At around the same time, Tapper sat down with the president for an interview.
Yet, as Kelly pointed out, he never raised the incident or questioned Biden about his mental sharpness.
“You sat right across from him, and you asked none of that,” Kelly said. “Notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you he would be fully transparent about his health issues.”
Kelly highlighted that Tapper had previously secured a commitment from Biden in 2020 to release his medical records — a promise the Biden failed to honor.
Despite that broken pledge, and the alarming nature of the Walorski moment, Tapper opted to ask broader questions about Biden’s age, rather than directly confronting him with examples of real-time cognitive lapses.
“You know as well as I do,” Kelly said, “that there’s a way you can say, ‘Hey, there’s this poll on your age,’ or you could say, ‘You just forgot that Jackie Walorski was dead.’”
She suggested Tapper’s framing allowed Biden to evade real accountability, especially at a time when public doubts about his mental fitness were intensifying.
In response, Tapper acknowledged the omission, saying, “That’s correct. I didn’t.”
He defended his decision by noting that the interview covered weighty topics like foreign policy and the war in Ukraine, but admitted with hindsight that he wished he had pushed harder on Biden’s mental acuity.
“I look back at my coverage with humility,” he said. “I wish I did cover the issues of age and acuity, but I wish I had covered them much more.”
Kelly was unsparing in her criticism, arguing that the media’s failure to press Biden allowed a larger “cover-up” to persist, one that Tapper himself now dissects in his own book.
English (US)