I spoke with Tapper on Wednesday, days after news that Biden was diagnosed with prostate cancer, about the book’s genesis, why it’s important to revisit Biden’s legacy amid Trump’s assault on democracy, and the journalistic reckoning he believes must take place.

I don’t have any reporting to suggest that it’s anything other than how it appears, but I will say that there’s a reason that the public is skeptical when officials disclose health information, and that’s because there is a long, sad history in this country of politicians not being honest about ailments and infirmities. It’s not just President Biden, although obviously our book is about that. Whether it’s Strom Thurmond or Dianne Feinstein, or Kay Granger —

You can go back. George Washington, if you want to take it all the way back. And so the reason why the public is often skeptical about what they’re told about the health of public officials is because public officials have for literally centuries given them reason to be skeptical. That said, obviously, we all are sending our best wishes and thoughts to the Biden family and hope that he beats this. But I don’t have any reporting suggesting that it’s anything other than the family disclosing something as soon as they learned it.

Well, it’s not what I think, or what Alex, my co-author, thinks; it’s what people close to Biden thought. We have Cabinet secretaries in the book saying that by the end of the Biden presidency, they did not have confidence that he would be able to handle that proverbial 2 a.m. phone call with a national security emergency. We have U.S. senators who had encounters with Biden that made them wonder how much he was up to speed on terrorism, how much he was able to manage the portfolio on immigration. So it’s not really about my opinion, it’s about what people who love Joe Biden and who believed in Joe Biden and supported his policies, told us were their concerns.

These individuals are still publicly making the argument that Joe Biden is capable of being president until January 2029. People, I guess, can make up their own mind about whether or not that’s something they agree with, but it’s a staggering claim.

Yeah. I don’t know what the current polling is, but before the debate, a vast majority of the American people and a vast majority of Democratic voters thought Biden was too old to do the job. You can make the argument that not only were these individuals lying to the public, lying to Democratic officials, lying to the Cabinet, lying to White House staffers, and lying to the media, but they were also lying to themselves. You can make that argument, but at the same time, I think there is just such a thing as empirical truth, and the Joe Biden that was on that stage the night of the debate was not able to speak in complete sentences or articulate any sort of vision for the country, and that is part of the job of being president.

First of all, Alex and I cover Donald Trump every day. I have a two-hour show, and we cover the Trump administration aggressively and we cover it skeptically. And so I don’t disagree with the premise that we need to also focus on who is currently president, but something that I think people need to keep in mind is how we got here. I interviewed George Clooney for an excerpt of the book that ran in The New Yorker, and I had just seen Good Night, and Good Luck on Broadway. Have you seen it?

The movie’s great, but the play’s even better. Clooney’s playing Edward R. Murrow, and he gives his famous “wires and lights in a box” speech, which is about the power of television. And then there’s the only part of the show that takes place outside of 1954, which is a montage of various clips from the TV news, whether it’s the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination or whatever. And it ends with some clips from cable of Republicans lying about the 2020 election and then Democrats lying about Joe Biden’s acuity and ability to do the job.

Clooney, of course, wrote that famous op-ed in the New York Times calling on Biden to drop out based on not just the debate but on what he saw behind the scenes at the fundraiser he threw. I asked Clooney, “Why did you include those parts of Democrats lying about Biden along with Republicans lying about the 2020 election?” And he said two things. He said, “One, we need to speak truth to power no matter who is in power.” I asked him about the people who come to see a Broadway show who would make the argument you just mentioned — how can you talk about Biden when we have Trump doing this? And Clooney said, “How do you think we got Trump?”

And I think that’s the whole point. One of the reasons why the Democratic Party’s numbers are in the toilet is because there’s a real anger out there at the party. And I believe part of that anger, if not most of it, is rooted in this gaslighting that the Democratic Party did about President Biden’s acuity while (A) obviously we all were watching him in front of the camera, all these moments of being addled, all these moments of tripping and gaffes and such. (B) what we all saw the night of the debate. And (C) now there’s this book that Alex and I wrote, sourced by more than 200 people, most of them Democrats, almost all of them talking to us after the election. We see it was even worse than we thought.

I had been covering this — not as aggressively as I wish I had, in retrospect — but I had been covering this since I asked then- Candidate Biden if he would pledge to be transparent about his health in an interview in September 2020. And I had long been an admirer of Alex’s reporting. In fact, after I noticed him in 2023, I think we started booking him on my show and I told CNN, “Why can’t we hire this guy?” They picked him up as a commentator. I still wanted him as a White House reporter, but in any case, I would have him on my show.

Before the election, I had talked to Democrats who thought that Harris was going to lose and that it was Joe Biden’s fault for he should never have run for reelection. I think it was a day before the actual election, Alex was on my set, and I said, “I think Kamala is going to lose tomorrow, and if she does, I want to talk to you about a book project.” I didn’t know Alex all that well at the time, but I liked him. I felt like metabolisticallyand journalistically, we were cut from the same cloth, although he’s 20 years younger and much sprier.  After the election, I reached back out to him and I said “Let’s do this.” And we started writing a proposal and a list of people we needed to interview, and we just started reporting the book immediately after the election.

The argument Democrats made to each other was we can’t be honest about what just happened, we can’t be honest about Joe Biden, because if we do, we’re going to hurt the Democrats and we’re going to help Donald Trump. But after the election, when it was moot because Trump had won, so many of them were willing to talk to us. So then Alex and I made a list, and we were just relentless with interviews and phone calls and meals. I think every meal, lunch and dinner for two months, except for breakfast, was with somebody to talk about this. Professionally, it’s been one of the most satisfying relationships I’ve ever had.

No one I care about is slamming me. I think people understand the truth of the book. So many people cooperated with it, and it’s just so soundly reported that there really isn’t any dispute about what we found. You have Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries out there saying, “We need to look forward,” which that’s for the voters to decide how effective and convincing that is. But behind the scenes, there were senators, House members, governors reaching out: “How do I get an early copy of the book? I need to see this. I’m so mad at these people. I can’t believe what they did.” And I know Alex and I have both gotten a lot of text messages from people who worked on the campaign, thanking us for telling the truth about what happened because this is a real scandal and a really horrifying thing to have happened.

I think a lot of people are still having kind of an emotional PTSD about it — people who worked for the Biden campaign, people who gave up their lives to move to Wilmington for a $35,000-a-year job, finding out that Mike Donilon demanded $4 million to give the advice that he gave. I think it’s rather triggering and upsetting, but Alex and I are just trying to tell the truth about what happened.

I think with a few exceptions, and those exceptions should be heralded, Siobhan Hughes and Annie Linskey from The Wall Street Journal, for example — the legacy media didn’t get what we needed to get in terms of investigating this. I certainly own my part of that, but I am not the only journalist in America. And I think that as with the lack of WMD discovered in Iraq, as with the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, as with some of the post-COVID pandemic reflections that we’re making about some of the steps that were taken, particularly in regard to closing schools, I think there needs to be a reckoning.

And quite frankly, I don’t think the news media is the only group of people that need to have that reckoning. I think public officials, especially Democrats, need to come to terms with what they knew and why they were quiet. Because at the end of the day, reporters are only as good as our sources and if our sources are lying to us, that’s a problem. But it’s a problem caused by the sources that are lying.

But they weren’t just saying it to the news media that he’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine. They were saying it to Cabinet officials even as they cut them off from having access to the president. They were saying it to Democratic donors. They were saying it to Democratic members of Congress. They were saying it to White House staffers that they were cutting off from having access, and they were saying it to themselves, because they were lying to themselves as well. So at the end of the day, it was, for want of a better term, a big lie.

The reason why the American people were far ahead of the news media and the Democratic elites on the story is because everybody understands aging, those of us who have gone through it with a grandparent or a parent or even ourselves. And the American people saw what was going on and understood it very well. So the bottom line though is that it was actually worse behind the scenes.

People have good days and bad days, good moments and bad moments. President Biden went on The View the other day. Was every moment of that interview a disaster? No. Were there moments that were really cringe-worthy and made you wonder whether or not this guy was really capable of being president until January 2029? Oh yeah.

I saw tweets from Republicans about that clip that reminded me of a dynamic in 2023 and ’24. Biden would be shown having genuinely shaky moments, but Republicans would frame that moment as “Biden is totally gone” or whatever. The “cheapfakes” that Democrats were alleging — there were some of those misleadingly editing videos. But the unedited versions weren’t good either.
The term “cheapfakes” was meant to suggest that same kind of mischief except using cheap technology, meaning like a misleading edit. And the White House began using this term with anything that was a depiction of President Biden seeming addled. The moment in that Los Angeles fundraiser — tellingly enough, it was not a video that was shared with the public, but that somebody had taken with their iPhone — shows Biden walking to the edge of the stage seeming lost and then Obama coming and grabbing him and getting him off stage. Biden staffers will say he was just basking in the warm glow and reception of the audience. The Obama people say he wasn’t worried about Biden; he just wanted to get the hell out of there and knew he couldn’t unless Biden got offstage. And then the White House called that clip a cheapfake. Well, there was nothing fake about it at all. And in fact, people in the room, Democrats who paid money to support Biden, including Congresswoman Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, were worried about what they saw with their own eyes. Now, there are other moments like Biden at the G7 seeming to wander off when he was walking towards paratroopers.

Yeah. That’s the one I think I had in mind.
But it was still odd. It was still an odd moment. And the prime minister of Italy still has to pull him back and get him to focus on what’s going on. Would it have been better if the entire clip showed that there were paratroopers that he was walking towards? Sure. But the oddness of the moment was not fake.

What do you think courage would’ve looked like in this situation? As we’ve discussed, many Democrats deluded themselves and convinced themselves of something that wasn’t true. But there were also a lot of people who saw stuff that was alarming and didn’t say it publicly. What would a successful intervention have looked like here? Would it have been Schumer and Jeffries getting together and issuing a statement that Biden shouldn’t run? Going to the Politburo with their concerns. None of this stuff really happened until it was too late. So what would’ve been, in your opinion, the best path forward there?
I think there are a couple pivotal moments where if people had said something even behind the scenes, it could have had an impact. But we have to recognize, first of all, that our current political media world has very little incentive for nonpartisan courage. It’s very difficult for a Cabinet secretary or a member of Congress to come out and say something against their own president. There really is no incentive structure built in for that.

It probably would’ve failed. 
If you read the excerpt we did in The Atlantic about Congressman Mike Quigley and his experience with Biden — we did some extra reporting on that — and you hear all the feedback he got from Democrats when he starts wanting to come out after the debate to testify … he had seen Biden addled in Ireland in April 2023. And you see there is just a reflexive culture of supporting your guy. That’s always there as a background before we have any discussion of what courage could have been demonstrated.

I think if the Biden team, the Politburo, had been people who actually were devoted to what’s best for the country and were able to see that beyond the shadow of Joe Biden, perhaps they could have said, “I don’t really know if you’re up to this. I don’t really know if you have it in you to do a presidential campaign.” This would be a decision made after the midterms in 2022.

But the truth is they were convinced that only Biden could beat Trump and that Trump was an existential threat to the country. And that they  had just had a positive result from the midterms, so the American people were with them. Also, Joe Biden had basically removed from his inner circle, anyone who would tell him anything that he didn’t want to hear. So Ricchetti, Donilon, Bernal, Cannellini, Klain, Jill, Hunter — these were people who all believed in the legend of Joe Biden. And there wasn’t anybody in there who was willing to say “I don’t think you’re up to this. I don’t think you can do this.” That would’ve been a time for that to happen. But it’s impossible to imagine any of those individuals doing it.

The next time would be in 2023 when Democrats are seeing all this stuff going on behind the scenes. If there had been a group of Cabinet secretaries or House Democrats or Senate Democrats that all got together and marched to the White House the way that Republican senators did during Watergate, who knows what could have happened. But again, there’s very little incentive for courage.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.