Jake Tapper Finds A Silver Lining

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Poor Jake Tapper, despite not being the principal author of Original Sin and paid largely for the use of his name, hasn't prospered from the book:

'Original Sin' sold 53,737 print units in its first week and reached the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, though this figure is significantly lower than comparable political books, such as Bob Woodward's 'Fear.'

Despite extensive promotion, 'The Lead with Jake Tapper' averaged 525,000 total viewers from April 28 through May 25, 2025, a 25% decline from the previous year and the show's lowest ratings since 2015. Tapper's show accounted for 11% of the cable news audience share, compared to 21% for MSNBC and 68% for Fox News during the same period.

Tapper has faced questions about his motives for writing the book, with some critics labeling it a 'money grab.' In response, Tapper has stated, 'The idea that I would do this for money is just silly and not true,' emphasizing that his main source of income is his work at CNN.

These things, of course, are relative. Alex Thompson, his co-author, who is said to have done the grunt writing work, doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, and his profile otherwise remains quite low. I asked Google AI where he went to college and got this answer:

Alex Thompson has attended multiple universities. For instance, Alex Thompson from Harvard University played water polo. Another Alex Thompson graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Economics. A third Alex Thompson played football at Marshall University, previously attending Wagner College.

Further inquiry suggests that Tapper's co-author is the Harvard Alex Thompson who played water polo. Maybe this is a good thing, at least for Thompson -- if Tapper takes all the heat, establishes the record of so-so book sales, and takes the ratings hit, Thompson still has a chance to make it big with his next book. But for Tapper, he can at least pull out a save for the team:

Jake Tapper claims that Joe Biden's mental deterioration led to the crisis at the border:
Jake Tapper: "You're complimenting it by calling it a policy.
Not to talk about my book again, but one of the things we discovered:
Senator Bennett from Colorado went to an event in 2024… pic.twitter.com/PFvJRG4imf

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) May 31, 2025

Note how for Tapper, it's "my book", not "our book", which is actually doing Thompson a huge, huge favor. But he's also taking the line I noted a week ago: Joe's mental decline wasn't official policy! It wan't anybody's fault! Joe never gave an order to open the border! It just sorta-kinda happened!

This dodge has been used most famously by Holocaust deniers:

{N]o document written or signed by Hitler ordering the Holocaust has ever been found. Deniers have claimed that this lack of order shows genocide was not Nazi policy.

But every event has a cause. The Holocaust occurred over a huge area, most of Europe, with uniform policies throughout, supported by a state bureaucracy and implemented consistently via the elaborate state and military rail system, which devoted enormous resources to transporting Jews to the extermination camps, themselves a major industrial enterprise. Nothing like this could have "just happened", or even "not happened".

By the same token, policies of releasing migrants into the US interior under an unenforced parole system, or flying hundreds of thousands in and inserting them into communities via a centrally funded resettlement program, were policy-driven efforts implemented consistently across the US, as well as in specific countries that supplied the migrants. This was a policy-driven effort that could have been stopped at any time, as the Trump administration did stop it, with remarkable speed.

This wasn't a case of isolated abuse by freelancing officials axceeding their authority. Whether sn enfeebled Joe Biden was fully informed, or if he even knew about it at all, is beside the point. Somehow, billions of dollars were authorized for national-level programs by officials with the authority to do so.

So far, we have yet to learn who waa actually behind these policies if Joe wasn't, but someone affiliated with the Democrat Party was making these decisions and ensuring that they were implemented. They were authorized by the bureaucratic chain of command, because as soon as Trump's people took over the chain of command, they were stopped.

The Mr Nobody defense won't fly. Maybe it's not a silver lining after all.