CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter said Tuesday that former President Joe Biden “can’t refute” how his deteriorating health helped hand the 2024 election to President Donald Trump.
New details surrounding Biden’s poor physical and mental health emerged Tuesday in “Original Sin,” a book written by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson, which detailed how Democrats and White House aides covered up Biden’s evident decline. Stelter said that these “damning” details are a firm confirmation that Biden’s health was waning.
“Biden being back on the public stage reminds people of what went wrong and it doesn’t negate what is in this explosive book,” Stelter said. “When you launch a book in the way Tapper and Thompson are doing next week, you come out with a first excerpt. So that first excerpt up on the New Yorker website right now, also available on CNN.com, it is very damning on what went wrong in 2023 and 2024. So to Jamaal’s point, I think there’s an emerging conventional wisdom, an emerging narrative that President Biden at the midterms in 2022 was a different person in the summer and fall of 2024. That his decline had escalated, that it had gotten worse in that period of time.”
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Stelter further noted that Biden’s attempt to reemerge in the public eye is a reminder to Democrats on why they lost the 2024 election. David Plouffe, who helped run former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, told Tapper and Thompson that Biden “totally f***ed” the Democrat Party ahead of the election.
“Biden can’t refute the basic facts of what happened,” Stelter continued. “I think it is really interesting how Tapper and Thompson have given an answer to all the liberals, all the Trump opponents who are saying ‘why are you focusing on Biden? Why are you reporting out what went wrong with Biden? Why are you looking back in time when Trump is doing so much in the present day to remake America?’ Well, the answer is right here in these first excerpts that are coming out. The authors say that ‘Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities’ and in the words of George Clooney, ‘that’s how Trump won.’”
“You know, ultimately, that’s how all of this conversation abut Biden and what happened goes to what is happening today with Trump,” Stelter said. “And I don’t think Biden has an answer to that fundamental issue, no matter what kind of press story he tries to launch.”
Biden appeared on “The View” on Thursday, where he blamed sexism for Harris’s loss to Trump. He also rambled as co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin asked him about his cognitive ability, leading former first lady Jill Biden to jump in and answer for him.
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Before the election, Stelter jumped to Biden’s defense by denying reports of the then-president’s decline. In June, Stelter attempted to discredit a lengthy Wall Street Journal report detailing Biden’s mental decline by stating that the media became obsessed over Biden’s age.
“They didn’t do any original reporting,” Stelter told former MSNBC host Joy Reid. “They didn’t follow up, they didn’t do any work, they didn’t do any of their own work at all. They just ate it up, and then they regurgitated what the Wall Street Journal said. That’s the worst form of so-called journalism out there. It’s not really news at all, and that’s my biggest complaint about this … They said ‘this could be an election decider,’ Joe Biden’s age. That’s true if the media obsesses over it and ignores Trump’s flaws.”
The CNN analyst echoed former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s use of the term “cheap fakes” to describe clips of Biden appearing to be confused and out of touch. He told CNN’s Abby Phillip in June 2024 that Americans may think Biden is falling apart mentally because they are viewing those snippets.
During an August 2020 segment of his canceled show “Reliable Sources,” Stelter argued that concerns about Biden’s health were a right-wing narrative.
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“What the heck is going on on these programs? Look at what Fox News saw on Saturday out of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. There’s Joe Biden out there on a vigorous bike ride. Not wearing a helmet but definitely wearing a mask, by the way. Fox’s narrative and talk radio’s narrative for months has been that Joe Biden is falling apart. You just heard Ben Shapiro say it, falling apart. And there he is riding a bike, out for a bike ride and Fox of all networks is the one who showed it happen.”
Despite writing a book about Biden’s decline, Tapper also previously discredited reports about the former president’s deterioration ahead of the 2024 election. On June 27, Tapper accused Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara, of mocking Biden’s stutter as she suggested that he was suffering from “cognitive decline.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
