Jake Tapper's Castrated Attempt At A Mea Culpa

Megyn Kelly serves up a delightful, long overdue public lashing of Jake Tapper, annihilating him for his dishonest coverage of Joe Biden.

I’ll say right off the bat that I’m biased. I’ve developed a growing fondness for Megyn Kelly over the past few years—partly because the way she breaks things down on her podcast often tracks almost exactly with how I think (profanity included), and partly because when I randomly met her a couple of years ago in Atlantic City, she was warm, endearing, and genuinely kind to a total stranger who had almost certainly had one too many vodka tonics in him.

On her podcast over the last few years—especially during election season—she’s consistently showcased her razor-sharp intellect and her passion for objective truth. For what it’s worth, she also happens to be just as stunning in person as she is on television—a rarity in the entertainment world, based on my experience.

Naturally, all of this makes her a perfect femme fatale counterpart to CNN’s Jake Tapper, whose work during the same period served as a kind of journalistic foil to Megyn Kelly’s. Everyone reading this blog already knows what Tapper did in the lead-up to the election: he repeatedly defended President Joe Biden’s mental acuity—not inherently a problem, except that 1) it bore zero resemblance to the truth and 2) he did so while claiming to be an “unbiased” journalist.

Tapper’s humiliating stint carrying water for the Democrats’ hapless candidate heading into the 2024 election turned out to be as pointless as it was obvious. He and a cohort of equally biased journalists—masquerading as “unbiased” fact-checkers—were delivered a crystal-clear message by voters in November, when President Trump bulldozed Kamala Harris, the Democratic elite, whoever was manning the autopen during the Biden era, and the rest of the deep state she had in tow with her.

The federal ass-whooping Harris received should’ve been Tapper’s cue to pull a Brian Stelter—disappear from TV for a year, sit quietly in a corner, and reflect on what he’d done. But no. Instead, Tapper went full DumbassDoubleDown™ and decided to write a book about how Biden had always been mentally unfit for office—after spending years lying about Biden’s mental state and insisting he was totally fit for office. The book, hilariously, lays out the details of the massive cover-up put in place to hide the fact that Biden has been the cognitive equivalent of a side dish of hand-mashed potatoes for years.

Tapper came out swinging, peppering his media interviews about his new book with indignant whining about how everyone was misled by the mainstream media when it came to Joe Biden. And hey, why not try to recalibrate and reposition yourself after such a public faceplant? Chris Cuomo seems to have pulled it off, and Democrats are even strategizing ways to start podcasting more—presumably in an effort to seem vaguely human. But all these efforts ignore one simple truth: no focus group or thousand-page McKinsey PowerPoint can teach you how to be honest, speak from the heart, stand by genuinely held values or actually sound like a real person.

Take Cuomo, for example. During COVID, he sat on CNN smugly mocking anyone who dared question the vaccine or brought up alternative treatments like ivermectin. Then he magically reappeared at a more conservative-leaning gig with NewsNation and even popped up on the right-wing PBD Podcast. To his credit, Cuomo took his medicine—most notably in a livestream debate with Libertarian Dave Smith, who mercilessly curb stomped him on a number of topics, to the roaring approval of a well-informed and rightly furious audience.

Maybe Tapper saw that and thought, “Okay, all I need is one solid public ass-whooping on a conservative platform, and I’m good. That’ll square me with all the people I insulted and lied to.”

Which brings us to his interview with Megyn Kelly a few days ago. From the jump, it felt like this was supposed to be Tapper’s version of Cuomo’s beatdown by Smith. I’m sure some part of him figured, no press is bad press for the book, and resigned to mumbling through a half-hearted mea culpa before trying to compete with himself on how many times he could mention his own book’s name during a 2 hour interview.

But if you’re anything like me, you didn’t tune in to the Megyn Kelly podcast for the book. You tuned in for the overdue piper-paying. After all, no one needs a detailed breakdown of Biden’s incompetence—we were all living it while Tapper purposely kept his head in the sand.

Kelly, in surgical fashion, force-fed Tapper about 25 minutes of his own bullshit before finally agreeing to talk about the book—which, let’s be honest, was probably the price of admission for having him on in the first place.

She wasted no time in challenging Tapper over his and CNN’s role in what she bluntly called “an attempted cover-up” of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. According to Kelly, “It wasn’t just falling down, it was getting lost,” a reference to Biden’s increasing public gaffes and reliance on editing tricks and teleprompters. “We knew and we were reporting on the multi-jump cuts in the videos of him, where it was obvious he couldn't get through a one-minute take.”

She made it clear that, from her vantage point, it wasn’t a secret—just a story most of the press didn’t want to touch. “It was clear to us that he was using teleprompter,” she said, adding, “There was some reporting on that at the time, all of which the White House was denying.” Then she got right to the heart of it: “There was an attempted cover-up. It could only ever work if you allowed it. If the press allowed it. Some of us tried not to, and some of us were complicit.”

Tapper, clearly on the defensive, tried to distance himself from the administration. “The Biden White House did not like me. OK?” he said. “I do not have great connections with the Biden White House.” But Kelly pounced. “Well, clearly, do you have a lot of sources? You say you talked to over 200 sources for this book.” Tapper clarified that this deep reporting came “after the election.”

Kelly, not letting up, pressed again: “You have some you could have called and worked.” Tapper insisted, “That's the point, is that they were not being honest.” But Kelly wasn’t buying it. “Well, how did The Wall Street Journal get it in June of 2024? And Jake Tapper and CNN couldn't find sources for this story then, before he dropped out?”

Tapper tried to give credit where it was due: “Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes did an amazing job in their reporting. And they should be heralded. And I heralded them.” He claimed he brought them on his show “right after the debate,” to which Kelly retorted: “After the debate. But you did not put them on when they published that story, which was before the debate.”

Caught off guard, Tapper admitted, “Correct. I don't know what the booking situation was. But it wasn't because I didn't want them. I'm sure I said that day, let's book.”

Kelly fired back with a damning summary: “Yeah. You put on a Democrat and you allowed the Democrat to rip on the report as a Rupert Murdoch sponsored hit piece.” When Tapper protested—“Megyn…”—she cut him off: “That’s what happened.”

Frustrated, Tapper snapped, “Megyn, if we're going to do this, let's just stick to the facts here, OK?” Kelly coolly replied, “Jake, that’s what I’ve been doing all along.”

And then, delivering the coup de grâce, Kelly dropped the final blow: “One of us didn’t miss the biggest story of the century when it comes to presidential politics, and one of us did.”

“You didn't follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs,” Kelly said at one point, “that he was losing his train of thought regularly. That he was slurring, that he was incomprehensible, that he was getting lost on the White House lawn.”

“You sat right across from him and you asked none of that,” Kelly continued, “notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you he would be fully transparent about his health issues.”

For Tapper, the game plan should’ve been simple: show up, fall on your sword immediately, and beg for mercy. There’s no gray area here—he got the story spectacularly wrong, and there’s no navigable route anywhere near common sense where a PR spin can fix beefing three years of political coverage. But of course, that’s not what happened.

Instead, Tapper bumbled through the interview, stammering and stumbling like a man who just discovered consequences, haphazardly offering up half-assed excuses while showing a total aversion to swallowing even the smallest dose of reality. Had he kicked things off with a sincere apology and admitted he was actively running cover for Biden, I wouldn’t even be writing this. But no—he clawed tooth and nail for any mirage of a scapegoat he could find, while Megyn Kelly ran up the score on him like he was a swing state in November.

And for me? The whole thing was delicious. Tapper getting his comeuppance is pure catnip for anyone who had to endure his sanctimonious nonsense during election season. But what I didn’t expect—the true cherry on top—was walking away from the interview thinking Tapper’s credibility with viewers, readers, centrists, and conservatives might actually be lower than it was before the interview.

If you had asked me beforehand, I would’ve told you that wasn’t even possible.

Putting aside the fact that the content of his book is irrelevant and about three years too late, it was deeply satisfying to watch a “comeback” PR tour go up in flames, sabotaged by the very same hubris that got Tapper into this mess in the first place.

And the whole self-immolating circus? Couldn’t have been narrated—or dissected—by anyone better than Kelly.

Here’s the full interview:

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