CNN’s Jake Tapper has a new book out that he penned with Axios’ Alex Thompson, and he sat down Tuesday for an interview about it with Sara Sidner.
The book takes aim at the final days of Joe Biden as president and is titled “Original Sin: President Biden’s Delcine, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.”
Among the topics discussed was the accusation in the book that Biden’s aides thought he might eventually need a wheelchair to get around.
“So the White House physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, was telling the White House aides that President Biden’s deterioration of his spine, the degeneration, was so significant that if he fell one more time, that he might have to be in a wheelchair and serve in a wheelchair for his second term,” Tapper reportedly said. “But everybody pushed off the notion that he use a wheelchair until after the election. This is all part of a larger whole where the Biden White House tried to hide the extent of his deterioration, both physical and cognitive, as much as possible. In fact, as you, we all know, we all saw, as his shuffling gait got worse and worse from (2023 to 2024), they started putting aides around him as he walked to Marine One, the helicopter, that was to kind of hide from public view how bad his gait was, how bad his walking was, his shuffling. And also in case he stumbled again to make sure somebody was there. And this is just a piece of an overall campaign to try to conceal from the American people the extent to which the president was really struggling to do his job.”
Sidner asked why more was not reported about those issues.
“Well, Alex Thompson and I were on the case, as were lots of other reporters trying to figure out what was going on behind the scenes,” Tapper said. “But the bottom line is the White House was lying, not only to the press, not only to the public, but they were lying to members of their own Cabinet, they were lying to White House staffers, they were lying to Democratic members of Congress, to donors about how bad things had gotten.”