Victor Davis Hanson says Jake Tapper’s Biden flip-flop proves it was always about politics

Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson called out CNN’s Jake Tapper on Friday for flip-flopping on former President Joe Biden’s mental decline, stating Tapper would have never turned on Biden if Democrats were still in the White House.

Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson released their new book “Original Sin” on Tuesday, detailing concerns over Biden’s cognitive health during his one-term presidency. While discussing the CNN host’s recent interview with SiriusXM’s Megyn Kelly on “The Victor Davis Hanson Show,” co-host Sami Winc asked Hanson for his thoughts on Tapper’s new pushback against Biden.

“But did he ever really say, ‘I’m sorry?’” Hanson asked. “I mean, he might have called Laura Trump up, but did he ever say to an audience, ‘What I told you was untrue? It was clear to me that he was mentally challenged, cognitively in decline. I attacked people who said that. I am sorry to all of you. That was unprofessional.’”

“I don’t expect him to do the proper thing and resign because he misled the country with catastrophic effects,” Hanson added. “If you think of the border and Afghanistan and the autopen part, all the terrible things that Biden did. I shouldn’t say Biden did, somebody did in his name. So he didn’t do that. He did say he felt humiliated.”

Prior to Biden entering the Democrats’ presidential primary in 2020, Republicans raised concerns over his mental fitness.

Call-outs of Biden stumbling and struggling to speak at times were later pushed by the GOP after he won the 2020 election, but Democrats and media pundits quickly brushed off the concerns.

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In 2020, Tapper interviewed President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and accused her of “mocking” Biden’s “stutter,” telling her she had “no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline.”

During his interview with Kelly on Tuesday, Tapper said he has since apologized to Lara Trump, stating he called her “months ago.”

“But here’s my point. Why has he said anything about that he was fooled or he was mistaken? The answer is pretty clear. It’s for two reasons. One, Joe Biden is out of power. More importantly, he hasn’t been president since June of 2024. He has no power to either punished or reward Jake Tapper,” Hanson continued.

“What I mean is if you flip that over in the converse, if Joe Biden was president right now, would he have said that?” Hanson asked. “No. If Joe Biden had stepped down and Kamala Harris was the candidate right now, would he have said that? No. So he was lying when he knew he was lying. So then the question is, why did he say it now? The answer is that he has a book out.”

During Biden’s time as president and throughout his 2024 campaign, Tapper, among other media personalities, had defended the former president. Notably, during Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, Tapper, who was one of the moderators, appeared to quickly bail out Biden after he froze mid-sentence during one of his arguments.

Hanson went on to speculate that Tapper’s publisher suggested the CNN host say he was “mistaken” about his coverage of Biden to “handle the incoming flack.”

“So my question is the same as Russian collusion, laptop disinformation, 51 intelligence authorities, thousands of files that were classified at Mar-a-Lago. Do they ever apologize? No. Did they ever learn from their lies? No. They just go on to the next. So why would I believe that when he was lying then, he’s telling the truth now? I don’t believe that,” Hanson said.

“So he, Tapper, just kind of married himself to this other guy’s book project and now he’s going to make millions of dollars after deceiving the American people and he doesn’t seem to be upset about it,” Hanson added. “I’d like to just ask him some questions. Jake, would you just please tell us, since you wrote the book and I haven’t read it and I’m not going to buy it, who was the person who conducted the auto-pin pardons?”

In addition to the uptick of media spotlight on Biden’s mental decline, the former president’s office revealed Sunday that Biden had been diagnosed with a “more aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has metastasized to the bone.

Doctors and cancer experts have since told the Daily Caller that, due to the state of the cancer, Biden likely had it during his time as president.

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