Last Tuesday, one of the several books about the 2024 campaign election, "Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House," was released, though there's more to come. On Tuesday, "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History" was also released. These books are full of details of the coverup involved in then President Joe Biden looking to run for reelection despite his diminishing mental faculties, before his fellow Democrats forced him out of the race on July 21. That certainly put Democrats in disarray, which the party still doesn't seem to have recovered from. Those closest to the president went for the particularly shameful move of trying to cover him up. On the most recent slate of Sunday show, several guests were asked about the now former president.
One such exchange took place between Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and host Jake Tapper on CNN's "State of the Union." That's a heck of a pairing, given that Walz was the poorly vetted running mate for then Vice President Kamala Harris, the replacement nominee. Tapper also has a book coming out next month with Axios' Alex Thompson.
Walz's appearance was already noteworthy, given that he was put on the spot over his bizarre town hall events he's doing to try to raise his national profile, without holding any as his time in governor in his own state. He was also asked about Harris' recent "I told you so" remarks.
Although Walz acknowledged that his own party is at a 29 percent favorable rating, per CNN's own recent poll, he bizarrely claimed that President "Donald Trump ends up with a 25 percent approval rating," prompting Tapper to further raise issues about the Democratic Party and Biden.
They were issues where Walz's answers were all over the place. Tapper ultimately directly asked, "Don't you think your party needs to acknowledge that President Biden was not up for the job of running for reelection and that this was a major mistake," though he was cut off by Walz offering that "he made that decision," something he repeated.
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"But you all went along with the idea that he was up for it. And he wasn't. And everybody saw it, and the country rejected it," Tapper responded back with.
"Yes, well, I--look, history will tell us to go back on that. That very well could be the case, Jake," Walz answered. "What I'm concerned about is learning from those lessons. I would hope we would never do it again, make a mistake. Make sure we go through and get someone. But I don't know where it helps us going forward," he added, continuing to go after Trump.
In what may be the most gaslit question in history, Jake Tapper (who repeatedly told his guests Joe Biden was cognitively sound) asks MN Governor and failed VP candidate Tim Walz why the Democrats went along with "the idea he was up for it."
— DeVory Darkins (@devorydarkins) April 6, 2025
Tapper: "Don’t you think your party… pic.twitter.com/lL4wlADOaV
Oddly enough, Tapper's own book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again," was not mentioned during the segment. Tapper has received plenty of heat already for actively trying to cover up for Biden, especially during the 2020 campaign against President Donald Trump, but this seems like a further problem to be leaving that detail out.
With such an exchange, Walz's expectedly pitiful answers aren't the only ones worth calling out, but also Tapper's lack of transparency.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who was aptly described by host Shannon Bream on "Fox News Sunday" as "a longtime defender of President Biden," was also asked about covering up for the president. He even co-chaired Biden's campaign.
Mentioning the book releases, Bream said about former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain that there were quotes "from former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain talking about how much the president deteriorated during his term. He was tired, confused, didn't understand the arguments that President Trump was making on issues like inflation that he was, quote, 'out of touch.'"
Quoting the Daily Beast, she added, "Klain's new comments suggest that the longtime political advisor and other members of Biden's team were increasingly aware of the president's mental and physical deterioration, even as they continued to project outward appearances of confidence in his abilities." As Bream directly asked Coons, "You co-chaired his campaign. Does that include you?"
Even as someone who was co-chair of the campaign, Coons evidently wasn't very much involved with the candidate.
"I was shocked at what I saw on the debate stage, the performance President Trump and President Biden had debating each other," referring to the June 27 CNN debate between Biden and Trump, when Biden's mental decline could no longer be so ignored, though there were of course signs before then. "I had frankly never seen what that quote suggests about President Biden's abilities," he continued, before trying to seemingly downplay his own role. "But frankly, Shannon, I haven't taken the time to read whatever's come out about this. I've been very busy this past week. As you mentioned, we stayed up all night Friday night debating and voting against the DOGE cuts, against the Republican budget bill, and speaking out against the tariffs. I'm happy to come back and do a future interview about whatever quotes come out in future books."
The interview was coming to a close at that point, so while Coons doubled down on how, "right now, I'm focused a lot less on retired private citizen Joe Biden and a lot more on how President Trump's tariffs are going to hurt middle Americans," Bream didn't have the chance to push back.
A particularly staunch foe of Trump, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) was also asked about covering up for Biden. His answer may have been the most pathetic, given how dismissive he was.
Like Bream did, host Kristen Welker on NBC News' "Meet the Press" mentioned Klain, specifically that he "reports that he was surprised by the fact that he thought that President Biden was struggling to focus. He said he seemed confused about President Trump's policies, and even fell asleep by the pool after cutting one debate prep session short." As she asked Schiff, "Do you think that former President Biden's advisors misled the American people about his capacities?"
What we saw was still more deflecting. "You know, it's hard for me to gauge what the closest advisors to the president were seeing at the time. I can only speak to the interactions that I had with him, which were, you know, in the months leading up to his getting out of the race, largely ceremonial occasions. But, you know, I will say this. He made the decision to get out of the race. I think that was the right decision," he offered.
Schiff then sung praises for Harris. "The vice president, as the vice president, I think ran a great campaign but could not run away from being a representative of the status quo," he also offered, as if her being a particularly unpopular vice president didn't have anything to do with it.
Predictably, Schiff then used his answer, most of his answer, actually, to rant and rave against Trump and Republicans. "And, the fact is that people are hurting and have been hurting for a long time. This is a frankly decades in the making problem where people are working harder than ever and still can't get by," he continued, which could certainly be said about how Americans fared under the Biden-Harris administration.
Schiff also had something of an answer for his fellow Democrats in there too, though. "What Donald Trump is doing right now is making that so much worse. But we have to address it. Both parties are going to need to address this. Right now this budget that you're talking about is going to give a massive tax cut for billionaires. And they're going to take it out of middle class families. And they're going to explode the deficit and debt. That's just going to move us further in the wrong direction. So, we're going to have to grapple with some of the central challenges, structural challenges in our economy," he added. "I think the failure of Democrats to do that in the past resulted in our losing the White House. The catastrophic, you know, damage they're doing to the economy now is going to cause Trump and Republicans to lose Congress. But both parties are going to have to tackle this global challenge to our economy."
While it may be helpful for his fellow Democrats to hear such a message from one of their own, the question was about covering up for Biden, and Schiff should have focused his energy on that.
Welker didn't respond to that, not even how Schiff barely answer her question about Biden. Instead, she segued to discussing Sen. Cory Booker's (D-NJ) 25-hour speech from last week on the Senate floor, and the problems he brought up. Booker was himself a guest on one of the Sunday shows, "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," where his speech came up. Just as Schiff had done, Booker made quite the claims about Trump that could be said about Biden, as we covered on Monday.
What made Schiff's answer even more pathetic, as Bob Hoge highlighted for our sister site at RedState, is that the senator had also been ranting and raving about Trump at the start of the segment, when he was asked about tariffs.
As Schiff answered in part, "unfortunately he's wrecking our economy. I think people have seen their retirement savings on fire. And there he is out on the golf course. That may end up being the most enduring image of the Trump presidency, that is, the president out on a golf cart while people's retirement is in flames."
