Axios' Alex Thompson and CNN's Jake Tapper are publishing a book on May 20: Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
When the announcement was made, the internet went berserk. Old videos resurfaced of Tapper, a Democratic mouthpiece, defending Biden in the 2020 election cycle. When President Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, criticized Biden zombie appearances in his campaign, Tapper wrote on Twitter that it’s "worth reading this remarkable piece about his stutter.” Tapper was shamelessly and dishonorably covering for Biden, who clearly had dementia. Now he’s trying to play Woodward and Bernstein and hawking a book exposing the very lies he helped perpetrate.
On X, journalist Mollie Hemingway represented the general response to Tapper: “The mother bleeping AUDACITY of you to do this after running 24-7 interference on behalf of him and mocking and attacking every single person who noticed Biden's decline. The MOTHER. BUH-LEEP-ING. AUDACITY. Have you no decency? Have you NO shame?”
He doesn’t. He also, like most modern journalists, doesn’t have any street smarts. Living in a liberal bubble, Tapper had no clue how the news of Original Sin would be received. Now he and his publisher, Penguin Press, are probably panicking. I’d offer to do a fair assessment of Tapper’s book, but he’s sore at the shellacking I gave his last novel, All the Demons are Here. He even DM’d me to gripe about me “trashing my new book.” I thought I gave his book an honest review—even if CNN tried to trash me.
The strategy for Tapper, Thompson and Penguin at this point is to get Original Sin on the bestseller list even if they have to play fast and loose to do it. Most people don’t realize that it only takes sales of a few thousand copies of a book to land on The New York Times bestseller list. It’s also a curated list, which means that liberal editors manipulate who gets on there. Using his CNN perch and attention from other sympathetic liberal media, Tapper should be able to hit the mark, even if it’s at low end. Brian Seltzer’s 2023 Network of Lies sold just a few thousand copies and was on the list for a week. Stelter will be grabbing his ankles for the Tapper promotional train—as will The Washington Post, New York Times, and the comatose legacy media.
Tapper can also call his book “controversial” in the hopes to generate buzz. The reality is that the book’s dishonorable, but doesn't have to get into details. Most likely Tapper will just forge ahead and ignore his critics.
I mentioned that Original Sin isn’t the most disastrous book launch I have ever seen. That belongs to The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. It was written by Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin. Journalist Mollie Hemingway was able to get an early copy of the book, which was published in the fall of 2019. Hemingway torched a bogus story that was being sold by the book’s authors.
A Times story that was posted on September 14, 2019 days before the Education book launch. The story was an excerpt from the book that claimed that in the early-1980s a woman at Yale University had been the victim of a sexual assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh became a Supreme Court Justice in October 2018. The problem was that the woman said she had no memory of the alleged incident.
In reporting the story, Kelly and Pogrebin, the authors of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, left out this fact. The two women were caught because Hemingway managed to ruin Pogrebin and Kelly’s book several days before it was even published. The book imploded. Pogrebin and Kelly were mocked on social media by everyone across the political and journalistic spectrum from The View to Joe Scarborough to Fox News. They became a joke.
As Hemingway reported at the time, Robin Pogrebin told one of Kavanaugh’s former classmates at Yale what to say. Karen Yarasavage recalled that Pogrebin had called her up and posed as an old Yale friend, failing to note that the purpose of the call was to write a hit piece on Kavanaugh. Pogrebin tried to get Yarasavage to go on record saying that a classmate supposedly assaulted by Kavanaugh “became a different person, a lot more liberal.” Yarasavage said: “I have no idea if that is true, truly speculation. I told [Pogrebin] I don’t want to be included at all in any way… I don’t want to read any of the articles because everything is taken apart and put together to sensationalize and may not even read true in the end.”
All of this came out on the eve of publication of The Education of Brett Kavanaugh. Weeks later the book was selling for half price in the remainder bin—a fate probably waiting for Tapper and Thompson. The American people will forgive a lot of mistakes, but they can’t stand people who act without honor. If Tapper doesn’t come clean about his hypocrisy, all the accolades and lecture circuit appearances won’t help him. He’ll be toast. God help Tapper if Mollie Hemingway gets an early copy of Original Sin.
