The hosts of ABC News’s The View took swipes at CNN, Jake Tapper, and the Trump administration as they attempted to dismiss revelations regarding former President Joe Biden‘s ‘aggressive’ cancer diagnosis and those who shielded him from the public.
On Tuesday, the book co-written by Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, was released. The pair’s discussions with over “200 White House insiders,” they say, proved that Biden’s mental decline began long before he dropped out of the 2024 race.
“So, should anonymous sources who talked to Tapper have spoken up about their concerns while he was in still in office? My other question is why is this important to know now?” cohost Whoopi Goldberg wondered. “Because it just seems to me, you know, we got a lot of stuff to be concerned about at the moment.”
“When is Jake Tapper going to write a book about the cognitive decline of the person in charge right now?” cohost Joy Behar added, referencing President Donald Trump. “When did CNN become a place to hawk your book? Is Wolf Blitzer coming out with a cookbook?” Before also criticizing the network’s Van Jones and Brian Stelter for discussing the new tell-all, Behar read a list of what she claims are “Trump’s atrocities,” which included cutting Medicaid, slashing funding for cancer research, and the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to the federal government. Trump made it clear on Tuesday that there would not be cuts to Medicaid.
The show also read Biden’s granddaughter Naomi Biden’s review of the book from X. Naomi is the daughter of Hunter Biden and lived in the White House with her grandfather, even holding her wedding ceremony there.
“This book is political fairy smut for the permanent, professional chattering class. The ones who rarely enter the arena, but profit from the spectacle of those that do. Put simply, it amounts to a bunch of unoriginal, uninspired lies written by irresponsible self promoting journalists out to make a quick buck,” Biden wrote on X. “It relies on unnamed, anonymous sources pushing a self-serving false narrative that absolves them of any responsibility for our current national nightmare. All of this at the expense of a man so completely good and honest that it is impossible for these people to ever understand the why or how of it all. There are real stories to be told and one day they will be. I suspect history will reward the truth.”
Cohost Sunny Hostin then pivoted to fault-finding the first Trump administration, where a number of books were written after people left the administration.
“What I do think that we should be very, very concerned about are the people that were in the Trump administration that did hold on to information about how Trump was conducting the presidency, saw they could make money off of their book,” Hostin said. “We’re talking about former national security adviser John Bolton, who came on the show hawking his book, and I told him, ‘Why didn’t you say something before?’ Former Attorney General Bill Barr — he wrote a book — didn’t say anything while he was in there. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and that White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, all of them knew what Trump was, who he was, how he was doing it.”
TAPPER AND THOMPSON: BIDEN HANDLERS ‘INCREASINGLY DECEITFUL’ AS HEALTH WORSENED
The View hosts have long supported the Bidens. During the May 8 episode, the former first couple denounced the books being released.
“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day. I mean, he’d get up, he put in a full day,” former first lady Jill Biden said. “And then at night … I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop.”