It finally happened. Jake Tapper, CNN's straight-faced moralist and professional eye-roller, has decided to cash in on the very thing he spent years telling you wasn't happening: Joe Biden's cognitive decline.

Tapper's new book, Original Sin, co-written with Axios' Alex Thompson, claims to expose the cover-up of Biden's deterioration during his presidency. It's filled with revelations that were obvious to any American with eyes, ears, or a functioning brain: Biden laughably not recognizing George Clooney and Clooney moaning about it, aides privately debating whether he needed a wheelchair, his doctor joking that staff were working him to death. Riveting stuff. Would've been even more riveting in, say, 2020. Or 2021. Or any time before Joe Biden announced he was stepping down.

But Tapper didn't report it then. No, when it mattered, he scolded people for raising the alarm. Take his 2020 interview with Lara Trump, where she mentioned Biden's clear signs of decline. Tapper immediately cut her off and accused her of "mocking a stutter." He wagged his finger, declared she had "no standing" to comment on Biden's cognition, and tossed in a condescending "I'm sure it's from a place of concern" for good measure. Sarcasm, it turns out, is only acceptable when it's sanctimonious and delivered in a thousand-dollar suit.

That's just one example. Throughout Biden's presidency, Tapper and his fellow media gatekeepers told us everything was fine. The bike fell? A fluke. The Air Force One stumble in 2021? Barely a segment. The "Where's Jackie?" incident, in which Biden searched a crowd for a deceased congresswoman? Crickets. You'd have better luck finding coverage of Hunter Biden's laptop on CNN than a frank discussion about whether Grandpa Joe was okay.

And when conservative voices or independent journalists dared to ask if the President of the United States was mentally up to the job, the media response was lockstep: How dare you. You monsters. You ageist conspiracy theorists. Jen Psaki practically had a second career waving away questions with a smug smile and some version of "he's hard to keep up with." Now she's defending herself with claims of "I'm not a doctor." Fair enough, but where was that attitude during COVID? 

Now that Biden's done? The vultures have landed.

Tapper's book, excerpted by Axios, casually recounts conversations among Biden's top aides about needing to hide his condition, not treat it, not address it, but hide it. Aides rerouted stage setups to minimize stairs. They coached him on where to step. They put him in sneakers to steady his gait and rehearsed walking paths like a Broadway show. It wasn't a presidency; it was a production. And the press played the orchestra.

You'll have no shortage of media figures now expressing shock at Biden's state. Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times that Biden's debate performance broke his heart. David Remnick at The New Yorker practically wept into his copy of the 25th Amendment. Joe Scarborough, once Biden's most devoted on-air defender, pulled a complete 180 after the first 2024 debate, asking if any Fortune 500 CEO would be kept on after a performance like that. A week before, he shouted down Wall Street Journal reporters for suggesting Biden was slipping and saying, "And F you if you can't handle the truth. This is the best version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever… if it weren't the truth, I wouldn't say it." So I guess that wasn't the truth. 

Millions of Americans were told to shut up and trust the experts. The same experts are now cashing in on the truth they actively helped suppress. As Tapper now admits, his reporting during Biden's term was incomplete. "I look back on it with humility," he said in a rare moment of candor. Humility is great. But save the mea culpas for the foreword, not the back cover.

And let's be clear: Tapper wasn't just a passive participant. He didn't miss the signs. He helped manufacture the alternate reality. In March 2024, after Biden's State of the Union, Tapper declared the President "sharp" and mocked right-wingers for calling him senile. Just months later, Tapper is telling us that in private, Biden couldn't remember names, lost his train of thought "to an alarming degree," and couldn't even recognize famous friends.

This isn't journalism. It's an exit strategy.

The same press that accused you of medical disinformation is now quoting Biden's doctor, Kevin O'Connor, as saying another bad fall could put the President in a wheelchair. They're now citing over 200 Democratic insiders, all of whom only talked after Biden dropped out, as if they're whistleblowers, not collaborators.

The Washington Post, for its part, admitted in an editorial that Biden had shown signs of slipping for a long time, but his staff worked to conceal his decline. Incredible. The same Post that used to slap "fact-check" labels on stories about Biden's confusion now casually throws around terms like "frailty" and "cognitive decline" with the detachment of someone reading the weather.

They're all trying to rewrite history, not to correct the record, but to control the next chapter. The real story is not that Biden declined. The real story is that the people who were supposed to tell you the truth knew it, hid it, and are now profiting from the fallout. Jake Tapper's Original Sin isn't that he wrote the book. He's waited to tell the truth until the body was cold and the checks were cleared.

If there's any justice left in journalism, Tapper's next book tour should include a long stop and look in a mirror.