CNN’s Tapper tries to make Trump’s health the issue after Joe’s cancer spoils book rollout

Failing to smoothly retcon corporate media’s complicity in covering then-President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, CNN’s Jake Tapper tried deflection with the left’s favorite shiny object.

On the eve of the release of his book “Original Sin,” co-authored with Axios’ Alex Thompson about the cover-up of Biden’s health during his administration, Tapper found a lane to raise doubts about President Donald Trump and dove right in.

As CNN’s “The Lead” kicked off, the host was joined by CNN’s chief national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny from the White House lawn, where Vice President J.D. Vance’s comments on Biden were used as an inroad to Trump.

“Let me ask you Jeff, in light of Vice President Vance’s remarks what is the current White House saying about President Trump’s health and President Trump’s doctors?” questioned Tapper in a clip Curtis Houck, managing editor of the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters, drew attention to with the caption, “CNN’s Jake Tapper and Jeff Zeleny spent part of a segment on Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis by wondering about President Trump’s health and if everything’s okay with him. Incredible.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Jeff Zeleny spent part of a segment on Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis by wondering about President Trump’s health and if everything’s okay with him.

Incredible. pic.twitter.com/kjBZoTPkN3

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 19, 2025

Speaking from Air Force Two as he returned from the trip to attend Pope Leo XIV’s Mass of Inauguration of his Petrine Ministry, the vice president told the press while wishing the former commander-in-chief “the best,” “Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or at some point in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job.”

“You can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with the recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there was staffers around the former president — I don’t think he was able to do a good job for the American people,” Vance went on. “And that’s not politics. That’s not because I disagreed with him on policy. That’s because I don’t think that he was in good enough health.”

In response to Tapper’s question, Zeleny said, “Well, of course, President Trump was the oldest American to be sworn into office as president. He is 78, so he’s a bit younger than Joe Biden, but was older at the time of his swearing-in. In the White House briefing today, there were some questions for the White House press secretary about the current president’s health.”

Before the host would later go on to question the thought process of Trump “simultaneously trying to pick fights with A-list celebrities who have historically backed Democrats” amid trade negotiations and deportation efforts, he followed the deflection to Zeleny by talking up the “lifetime of challenges” that Biden had “to a great extent, overcome.”

“It’s one of the things that so many of his fans love about him, this idea that no matter what life throws at him, he can get back up,” Tapper told CNN correspondent Arlette Saenz, described by Houck as the “network’s Biden regime apple polisher.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper to the network’s Biden regime apple polisher, Arlette Saenz: “The prostate cancer diagnosis is the latest in what has been a lifetime of challenges and potentially devastating events, and to a great extent, overcome. It’s one of the things that so many of his… pic.twitter.com/RSJw0c9m9J

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 19, 2025

Despite Tapper’s efforts to turn the focus to Trump’s health, former Democratic strategist Dan Turrentine argued his party had stripped itself of credibility for covering what was widely considered Biden’s obvious decline.

“That’s the irony, is that even Democrats knew — because 70 to 80% of them kept telling pollsters in 2022 and 2023 he was too old. It was the party leadership that kept saying, ‘Nope, we’re going with him.’ Like, ‘We can’t have a primary. If he steps down, we’re going to get Kamala Harris,’ right?” Turrentine said on “The Morning Meeting.”

“There’s such little credibility within the party and the media now to pivot and say, ‘Well, now we have to ask all these questions about Trump’s health and about what Trump’s family’s doing and Don Jr.’ and, like, everything, when there was such a blind eye with all of what was going on with Biden,” he added. “So look, we paid a price. We lost.”

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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