CNN’s Jake Tapper is defending his failure to report on President Biden’s cognitive decline until he wrote his new book, “Original Sin,” saying he simply didn’t see it because “Joe Biden has been saying stupid things for decades.”

Mr. Tapper is promoting his new book, which he co-authored with Axios’s Alex Thompson, focused on Mr. Biden’s physical and cognitive decline while he was president. While the book appears to have sparked a reckoning among Democrats, conservatives are asking why Mr. Tapper — a leading member of the mainstream Washington media — did not press the president about his health while he was in office. 

A conservative podcaster, Megyn Kelly, asked Mr. Tapper on Tuesday why he did not more thoroughly investigate the president’s health.

Mr. Tapper responded by saying he has “humility” about his coverage, but also defended it, saying, “The comments of Joe Biden … making gaffes, saying things stupid, tripping, are all important and all deserved to be aired and all deserved scrutiny.”

“But as you know Megyn … Joe Biden has been saying stupid things for decades,” Mr. Tapper said.

Ms. Kelly shot back by noting that conservative outlets were reporting on some of the details in his book that are being treated by left-wing outlets as bombshells “like the multi-jump cuts in the videos of him where it was obvious he couldn’t get through a one-minute take so they had to use those.”

The two journalists wrote in “Original Sin” that White House staffers started to use two cameras to film Mr. Biden speaking because they believed it would make the editing done to remove the president’s verbal stumbles less obvious. Many conservative journalists at the time suggested the cuts were being made for just that reason. 

Ms. Kelly also asked Mr. Tapper about an October 2022 interview with Mr. Biden and why he did not press the president on an awkward moment when he asked if a late congresswoman, Jackie Walorski — who had died in a car accident weeks earlier —  was in the room. 

“One month after the Jackie Walorski thing, you didn’t ask him about it,” Ms. Kelly said. “You didn’t follow up on the fact that he was falling up the stairs. 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. Notwithstanding the fact that he had promised you, he would be fully transparent about his health.”

Mr. Tapper said that was “true,” but defended his performance in the interview as he said, “I did ask him about his age and the fact that the American people had concluded that even though he said whenever anybody brought up the subject of his age, ‘Watch me.’ And I said, they’re watching you and they are concerned that you were too old for this job.”

However, Ms. Kelly suggested that the CNN host could have asked about the president’s poll numbers and the Walorksi comment to press him on “actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience, and you didn’t do it.”

“Like I said, I feel humility about my coverage,” Mr. Tapper responded. “I mean, it’s not like I was asking him his favorite movie, or his favorite color. We were talking about Putin. We were talking about other issues of national importance.”

During the interview, Mr. Tapper also addressed a viral moment from 2020 in which he accused Lara Trump of “mocking” a “stutter” when she suggested Mr. Biden was experiencing a cognitive decline.

The journalist told Ms. Kelly that he apologized to Ms. Trump “months ago.” He said, “After we did the research for this book and I realized how bad his acuity issues were … I called Lara Trump, and I said, ‘You were right.’”

“Her comments have aged well. My comments have aged poorly. I own that,” he said about the interview. 

Mr. Tapper hired a crisis public relations specialist, Risa Heller, who has been dubbed the “queen of scandal PR,” ahead of the release of his book. The hiring sparked speculation that Ms. Heller was helping to train him to be “nicer,” as he is expected to face questions about why he allegedly only noticed the signs of the decline he documents in his book after the 2024 election. 

While the journalist maintained a calm, level voice during the interview, his explanation of his past coverage of Mr. Biden will likely not be convincing to those accusing him of helping to cover up the president’s condition during his time in office. 

Although the exchange with Ms. Trump has gone viral as a prime example of Mr. Tapper covering for Mr. Biden, that is not the only moment conservatives are recalling. The Free Beacon notes that in 2019, Mr. Tapper brushed off concerns about Mr. Biden’s age by calling him a “gaffe machine.” During the 2020 election, the CNN host said Republicans raising questions about the 46th president’s health are “hypocritical.”

After Mr. Biden’s disastrous June 2024 debate with Mr. Trump, Mr. Tapper stated that the president had shown “deterioration, at the very least, in his communication abilities in the last, really in the last six to nine months.” Nearly a month later, he expressed skepticism when Speaker Johnson said Democrats were engaged in a “big cover-up” to “prevent people from seeing what all of us in close proximity [to Biden] have seen.”