CNN star Jake Tapper called Lara Trump to apologize for a condescending on-air dispute in 2020 where he dismissed her concerns about Joe Biden’s mental acuity. President Trump’s daughter-in-law revealed the phone call on Fox Tuesday but said his apology was ‘a little too late’ – conveniently taking place just weeks before the publication of his tell-all book about Biden’s cognitive decline in the White House.

Tapper has faced fierce backlash on his reporting in the book, with critics noting he participated in the ‘cover-up’ he is now intently criticizing. One of the most prominent examples of this was back in October 2020, when Lara pointed to a speech of Biden’s and said: ‘What we see on stage is a very clear cognitive decline.’ Tapper immediately interjected, savaging her with a haughty response that she had ‘absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline’ and accusing her of instead ‘mocking his stutter.’

While Tapper has publicly apologized for his response and admitted a sense of ‘humility’ over being proven wrong, Lara has now revealed he reached out to her privately two months ago. ‘Jake Tapper called me about two months ago and he said “I have this book coming out,”‘ she told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Tapper told her ‘I know everybody is saying I should apologize to you. I plan, when the book comes out, to go on TV and say you were right and I was wrong.’ While Trump appreciated the acknowledgement and that Tapper has since stuck to his word by apologizing publicly, she noted that ‘it feels a little bit too late to me.’ ‘Jake Tapper can’t discount his role in that, no matter how much he wants to come out now,’ she said. ‘They have lost the American people’s trust… It is the reason Donald Trump is in the White House right now. People like authenticity.’

Lara went on to say that the ‘over-arching thing is that the damage is done’, and raised questions about whether Biden’s cognitive decline ever would have been publicly addressed if he had secured another full term. Tapper first publicly apologized to Lara on the Megyn Kelly show after she replayed a damning snippet of their conversation live on air. ‘Do you want to apologize to Lara Trump?’ Kelly asked. ‘There is a way of pressing a man like that on the actual infirmities to bring it home to him and to the audience and you didn’t do it. That’s correct. I didn’t,’ Tapper confessed. ‘And like I said, I feel humility about my coverage.’

Lara first addressed how Tapper’s new book had impacted her with a subtle dig at him on X on February. At the time, she re-shared a June 2024 post criticizing Tapper’s treatment of her. ‘Seems like a good time to remind everyone that in 2020 Jake Tapper, first, accused me of making fun of people with a stutter (an atrocious accusation) and then attempted to shut me down and ended our interview when I tried to warn people of Joe Biden’s very obvious cognitive issues,’ she wrote in the 2024 post, just one month before Biden departed from the race. He doubled down his apology on Piers Morgan Uncensored on Monday. ‘Knowing what we know now, and looking back on that interview, which I feel tremendous humility about, she [Lara Trump] was right, and I was wrong. I did not see, in the moments he was having, I did not see that as cognitive decline,” Tapper said.

In that same interview, he said the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline may have been ‘worse than Watergate’ – referring to the Richard Nixon saga long considered one of the greatest scandals in political history. ‘This is an entirely separate scandal. Maybe even worse … maybe even worse,’ Tapper ultimately admitted. ‘It is without question – and maybe even worse than Watergate in some ways because Richard Nixon was in control of his faculties when he was not drinking.’ During the 1972 scandal, the Nixon administration attempted to cover up a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Nixon was forced to resign and ‘Watergate’ is now synonymous with political corruption, becoming somewhat of a benchmark through which subsequent administrations are judged.

While Tapper denies actively participating in a cover-up, he has accepted that he, along with the majority of left-leaning mainstream media – missed the signs for far too long. ‘There should be a lot of soul-searching not just among me but among the legacy media to begin with – all of us – for how this was covered or not covered sufficiently,’ he said. ‘I wish I could do differently.’ ‘Conservative media absolutely has every right to say, “We were hip to this and the legacy media was not,”‘ he added. The turning point for him was the disastrous debate between Biden and Trump in June 2024, which he and fellow CNN star Dana Bash moderated.

The duo had iPads which they used to communicate with their production team throughout the debate. Early on, Tapper sent a message to his crew backstage. He didn’t know which staff were working, so he ‘tried to keep it clean.’ ‘I wrote ‘holy smokes,” he told Kelly. ‘I wanted to write ‘holy [expletive].’ Around the same time, Bash slid him a piece of paper, with her own message on it. It read: ‘He just lost the election.’ In addition to questions about Biden’s cognitive ability, his recent diagnosis with late-stage prostate cancer has fueled conspiracy theories about whether he was aware of – and hid – his sickness while president.

Biden’s team have maintained he was not tested for prostate cance r while he was president, and that the diagnosis is recent. That reassurance has not stopped MAGA loyalists from demanding his long-term physician Kevin O’Connor be subpoenaed to answer questions about Biden’s health. O’Connor repeatedly assured the American public during Biden’s term that he was healthy and could have served another four years. Simultaneously, several of Biden’s closest aides are facing pressure to reveal how much control they had over his autopen after Trump raised questions about who was really in charge during the Biden administration.

According to the book, which is based on hundreds of interviews, ‘access’ to Biden diminished significantly during his White House term, as his staff allegedly walled him off, even from cabinet members. One cabinet secretary told the authors that he didn’t brief the president directly in 2024 but only spoke to the president’s aides. Even still, insiders maintained they were not aware of how dire the situation had become until it was too late, despite Biden’s repeated gaffes and tumbles on the public stage.

One of the most shocking incidents took place in September 2022 incident Biden called out for Republican Congresswoman Jackie Walorski at a White House event. ‘Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie,’ he said scanning the audience. ‘She was going to be here.’ Walorski had been killed in a car crash in August and Biden and the First Lady had issued a statement extended condolences to her family at the time. Another standout moment for Tapper was when Biden did not recognize actor George Clooney at a 2024 fundraising event, along with the revelation that White House aides were considering placing the president in a wheelchair if he were reelected.