Lara Trump Reveals What Jake Tapper Said to Her in Apology Call

Yahoo

5 days ago

Lara Trump said she got a phone call from Jake Tapper earlier this year vowing to 'go on TV' and admit fault to her after the release of his book.
On Tuesday's episode of The Ingraham Angle, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Trump about Tapper's admission last week that he had apologized to her for shooting down her claim during a 2020 interview that Joe Biden was in 'cognitive decline.'
Lara Trump, Donald Trump's daughter-in-law, told Ingraham she did indeed receive a call from the CNN anchor.
'Jake Tapper called me about two months ago, actually, and he said, 'I have this book coming out, and I know everybody's saying that I should apologize to you. I plan whenever the book comes out, to go on TV, and I will say you were right and I was wrong,'' she said.
'And I guess, to Jake's credit, he did that,' she added.
Tapper and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson co-authored Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, which has been flying off the shelves since its release last week. It goes into the lengths that Biden aides reportedly went to in order to preserve the then-president's public image as his health deteriorated behind the scenes.
The book has also stirred substantial controversy, attracting disapproval from both sides of the aisle. Its critics on the left accuse it of distracting from a much more dangerous threat—Donald Trump's presidency—while some conservatives have accused Tapper of participating in the so-called 'cover-up' by declining to report on Biden's declining health until after the election.
In October 2020, Tapper and Lara Trump clashed during a State of the Union interview over her previous suggestions that Biden had struggled to speak. Tapper accused her of mocking Biden's stutter. Defending herself, Lara Trump said Biden's speech showed him in 'cognitive decline.' Tapper told her she had 'no standing to judge somebody's cognitive decline."
On The Megyn Kelly Show last week, Tapper said he'd called Lara Trump 'months ago and said, 'You were right.''
'She saw something that I did not see at the time, 100 percent,' the CNN host told Kelly. 'I own that.'
He said in an interview with Piers Morgan on Monday he felt 'tremendous humility' over his comments to Lara Trump.
Biden revealed last week he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer earlier this month and will undergo treatment.
Lara Trump's revelation on Tuesday drew further criticism of Tapper.
'We live in a world where mainstream journalists are apologizing to members of the Trump family. Kill. Me. Now,' wrote former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan.
Ron Filipkowski, editor-in-chief of the liberal MeidasTouch network, accused Tapper of issuing a 'contrived fake apology to Lara Trump to pander to MAGA hoping they might buy some books.'
A CNN representative did not immediately return an email seeking comment from Tapper.