What the Backlash to Jake Tapper Really Reveals

The real threat to democracy is the refusal to confront its failures.

Jake Tapper has long been a trusted voice within the media class—not because he challenged power, but because he helped manage it. For years, he’s played the part of the serious, impartial journalist: not partisan, not conspiratorial, just a sober-minded defender of democratic norms. But that image has always depended on a deeper fiction—that the institutions he served were still functioning as advertised.

His new book disrupts that fiction, at least slightly. Tapper makes the case that President Biden’s decline was widely known and quietly covered up—not just by his inner circle, but by much of the press and consultant class. Not through explicit coordination, but through a shared incentive structure: a reluctance to ask uncomfortable questions, a dependence on access to senior officials, and a professional culture that rewards narrative management over confrontation. Many in the liberal class genuinely believed they were doing the responsible thing—defending democracy from the looming threat of Trump by saying as little as possible about Biden’s condition. But in trying to suppress a legitimacy crisis, they deepened it.

It’s not a radical claim. Biden’s physical and cognitive decline had been visible for some time—anyone paying attention could see that. What Tapper’s book does is confirm these public impressions with internal detail: how aides structured his schedule to limit exposure, how unscripted moments were avoided, how concerns were managed rather than addressed, and how voters were kept at arm’s length from the reality.

By elite liberalism, I don’t just mean Democrats in office. I mean the broader class of media figures, political consultants, technocrats, and institutional gatekeepers—across party lines—who present themselves as stewards of democracy while defending a status quo that no longer works. They frame their role as neutral, responsible, adult. But what they’re really doing is managing dissent, narrating decline, and preserving their own position.

And for that class, Tapper’s book was a breach. Not because it was wrong—but because it got too close to what they can’t admit out loud.

The backlash came quickly. Naomi Biden called the book “political fairy smut.” The hosts of The View demanded to know why he hadn’t written a similar book about Trump’s mental state—as if the only acceptable form of journalism is oppositional content about Republicans. The implication was clear: it’s fine to question a president’s fitness for office, but only if he’s not their president.

But none of the critics seriously engaged with the book’s central concern: that the public had been systematically misled, not by one rogue actor, but by a class of political and media professionals who believed their silence was a form of virtue.

This is what the great philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls ideology at its purest—not just in what is said, but in what cannot be said. For Žižek, ideology isn’t about what people consciously believe; it’s about the unspoken assumptions and habits that shape how we see the world. It’s the story we tell ourselves about why things are the way they are—and why they can’t be otherwise.

In elite liberal spaces, ideology operates not through propaganda but through performance. It appears as moderation, as responsibility, as “just following the facts.” But underneath that performance is a deep investment in preserving the system, even when it no longer makes sense.

That’s why the most dangerous thing isn’t always a lie—it’s an obvious truth no one is allowed to say out loud.

Groupthink in this context isn’t enforced by decree. It’s enforced by tone. By knowing what will and won’t get you booked, retweeted, invited back. It’s the nervous laugh when someone brings up a taboo. It’s the segment that gets cut for time. It’s the difference between what everyone knows and what anyone is allowed to say.

Tapper’s book crossed that line—not by revealing a secret, but by confirming what was already widely understood and giving it form. And the reaction wasn’t intellectual disagreement. It was panic.

Even Jon Stewart, one of the more trusted figures among liberal and centrist audiences, joined in. He criticized CNN’s coverage of the Tapper book as overhyped and self-promotional—fair enough. But when the discussion turned to Biden’s recent cancer diagnosis and whether it added weight to Tapper’s claims about transparency and decline, Stewart dismissed the question outright: “Nobody’s saying that,” he said, with a smirk. But of course people are saying it—quietly, hesitantly, off the record. The problem is that saying it too plainly triggers the very response we’re seeing now: reputational policing and coordinated attempts to discredit even modest truth-telling.

That defensiveness escalated with the public announcement of Biden’s cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, any discussion of the book’s claims was reframed as cruel. The liberal media line became: how dare anyone question him now?

The shift was immediate. One moment, Biden was the moral center of the pro-democracy cause. The next, he was above scrutiny—because to question him would now be indecent. As if illness cancels out the political stakes of hiding a candidate’s condition from the public. Biden’s response when asked about the book’s allegations against him? He told a reporter that he could “beat the hell out of both of them,” seemingly referring to Tapper and his co-author Alex Thompson.

The Executive Editor of one of the more visible voices of the “pro-democracy center,” questioned why Tapper’s book was receiving so much coverage, suggesting that ordinary people care more about grocery prices, health care, and cancer treatments. “To me,” she said, “that story isn’t nearly as significant to people’s lives…” as Trump’s latest policies.

It’s a familiar rhetorical move: invoke material hardship not to demand change, but to deflect critique. But the irony is hard to ignore. This same political and media class has spent years elevating symbolic protest, aestheticized outrage, and narrative control over substantive accountability. They rarely centered material conditions when it came to the failures of their own side. But when a journalist deviates from the script, they suddenly turn to the price of eggs.

But this isn’t just defensiveness—it’s ideology at work. The dismissal of Tapper’s book is a case study in how elite liberalism protects itself: by downplaying evidence that its own deference to power might have undermined the very democracy it claims to defend.

To dismiss Tapper’s account isn’t just to protect Biden. It’s to preserve the worldview that made his concealment politically necessary in the first place. The Tapper book punctures the illusion that elite liberalism is capable of confronting its own complicity. And that’s what makes it dangerous—not because it’s inflammatory, but because it quietly suggests that maybe the system isn’t self-correcting after all. Maybe it’s just self-preserving.

And here’s the deeper irony: the people most loudly claiming to “protect democracy” have shown almost no outrage at what is, at its core, a profoundly undemocratic act. A small group of unelected advisors knowingly concealed Biden’s condition from the public in order to keep him viable as a candidate. They made strategic decisions not just about messaging, but about who the electorate was allowed to see—and who they were being asked to vote for. That isn’t transparency. It isn’t accountability. And it certainly isn’t democratic.

Where is the outrage? Where are the calls for reform, for clarity, for limits on how far political operatives can go in managing reality on behalf of voters? The silence speaks volumes. Because in this ecosystem, “defending democracy” has come to mean defending the legitimacy of liberal institutions at all costs—even if it means obscuring the truth from the public they supposedly serve.

This is how groupthink operates in elite liberal circles. It’s not a conspiracy—it doesn’t have to be. It’s a shared incentive structure. A reflex to defend the legitimacy of the system even when the facts point elsewhere. A performance of reasonableness that keeps the boundaries of acceptable discourse narrow enough to preserve power, but wide enough to appear democratic.

Tapper didn’t write a revolutionary book. But he said the quiet part a little too clearly. And that was enough to remind everyone how fragile the frame really is.

The harder question is this: What would it mean to admit that the system liberal elites have spent years defending—against Trump, against populism, against the Right—might have failed on their watch?

None of this is to say that Tapper is above criticism. One of the most consistent—and justified—critiques of the book is that he waited until it was politically safe, and commercially advantageous, to publish what he already knew. That, too, reflects the pathology of the system: even dissent comes at a price. Tapper may have broken ranks, but he did so on his own timeline, after the election, with a carefully managed rollout. In that sense, his book doesn’t escape the logic of elite liberalism—it merely brushes up against its edge.

It may be the first real piece of journalism Tapper has done. And for the liberal class that spent years elevating him, that’s a step too far.

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If parts of this essay felt uncomfortably precise, it’s probably because I’ve been enjoying too much Žižek.

He’s one of the most chaotic philosophers alive—jumping from Hegel to Kung Fu Panda—he’s a joy to listen to and read. Living in the End Times is a good one. For podcasts/ lectures I’d recommend here, here and here.

One of my favorite examples is the story he tells about a well-educated man who hangs a horseshoe above his front door. The horseshoe is a spiritual symbol that is supposed to keep evil out of the house. A friend asks, “But you don’t believe in that nonsense, do you?”

“Of course not,” the man replies. “But I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.”

That’s ideology. The horseshoe is meaningless—but he keeps it there, just in case. He performs belief without believing.

This is how elite liberalism functions: everyone knows the system is broken, that it no longer delivers trust or legitimacy—but they act as if it still does. The rituals remain. The slogans get louder. The horseshoe stays nailed above the door.

Maybe those in power like it that way. But for those who’ve been systematically shut out, they don’t have the luxury of performance.