In his first public appearance since revealing his prostate cancer diagnosis, former President Joe Biden took the opportunity to lash out at CNN anchor Jake Tapper, who recently co-authored the book Original Sin. The book details the behind-the-scenes decline of Biden’s health during his presidency and reveals how Democratic Party insiders truly felt about his leadership and the party’s future.
Following a speech in Delaware on Friday, Biden was asked about Tapper’s book, co-authored with Axios reporter Alex Thompson. In response, Biden asserted his mental sharpness, saying he could “beat the hell out of both of them.”
“You can see that I’m mentally incompetent and I can’t walk, and I can beat the hell out of both of them,” the 82-year-old president told reporters.
Biden, who dropped out of the 2024 race after being pressured by fellow Democrats, was then asked by reporters what he would say to his party members questioning his decision to run for reelection.
“Why didn’t they run against me then?” Biden said. “Because I’d have beaten them.”
“I’m very proud, I’ll put my record as president against any president at all,” he continued.
During an interview on the Stephen A. Smith Show, Tapper revealed that several Democratic sources he and Thompson spoke to about the cover-up of Biden's health decline didn’t express remorse. He said that no one in the White House has openly admitted that running the former president for re-election might have been a mistake. He shared that a top White House aide told him Biden couldn’t have done the same short interview in 2023 that he did in 2022, which he found to be a shocking and revealing admission.
“We never got somebody that said, 'We should never have done this. I can't believe we did it. In retrospect, it was a mistake. How arrogant we were.' I mean, even, you know, there was a top aide, a top White House aide, who acknowledged to me that this short 10-15 minute interview I did with Joe Biden in October 2022, he would not have been capable of doing in October 2023. That admission was stunning to me," he said.
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Tapper, who has compared the Biden cover-up to being potentially worse than Watergate, said that during one of his pre-election interviews for his book, a source described the situation by saying all the former president had to do was win the election and "occasionally show proof of life." At the same time, those around him would run the country.
He said Democrats didn’t care about Biden’s mental fitness as long as he could defeat President Donald Trump, adding that he thought that mindset was “crazy.”
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