Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was pressed by CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday about whether Democrats should acknowledge that President Joe Biden was not fit to run for re-election.
“Don‘t you think your party needs to acknowledge that President Biden was not up for the job of running for re-election, and that this was a major mistake?” Tapper asked, as Walz claimed that Biden ultimately made the decision to drop out, though he was pressured to do so by party leaders, including Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “You all went along with the idea that he was up for it, and he wasn‘t, and everybody saw it. And the country rejected it.”
Walz, who was Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate in 2024, also told Tapper that the Democratic Party must engage in some serious soul-searching following their loss to President Donald Trump.
The CNN anchor also pressed Walz on Harris’ recent remarks, during which she said, “I’m not here to say I told you so,” on Thursday during a speech at an event in California.
“What does ‘I told you so’ really mean here? I mean, people heard her message. They did not vote for her. She lost every battleground state. You yourself have criticized the Harris-Walz campaign for being too cautious. She may have told the American people, you know, she may have warned the American people, but she didn‘t do it compellingly enough to win,” the CNN host said.
Walz acknowledged his accountability for the loss and criticized himself. However, he stated that Harris attempted to alert people about Trump’s intentions.
“I do think the challenge for Democrats, and this is, I think, a structural problem that’s going to take a lot more thinking. Why, with all of that out there, did they not think we were any better than that? And they didn‘t, and I’m very concerned with the folks who stayed home,” he said, adding that Trump did a good job in identifying what voters were most concerned about.
The CNN host inquired about criticisms that the Democratic Party was misleading Americans regarding inflation, the border situation, and Biden’s fitness for office.
“And then, fundamentally, this idea that President Biden was up for another four years of the job while Americans in poll after poll, for year after year, were saying, ‘He‘s too old to do the job,’ your party stood against all of those things,” Tapper said.
Walz stated that Biden effectively led the country out of the COVID-19 pandemic but criticized the Democratic Party for failing to communicate effectively on issues like immigration.
It should be noted that Tapper has a new book out called “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” co-written with Alex Thompson, claiming that the media and Democrats covered up Biden’s mental health decline.
In addition, Tapper himself can be associated with the cover-up. In a fiery 2020 interview, Tapper scolded Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump for saying Biden “very clearly” had “cognitive decline,” arguing that she was attacking his “stutter.”
“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 on X in February.
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“I’m like ‘Joe, can ya get it out, let’s get the words out, Joe.’ You kind of feel bad for him,” Lara said in the clip played by Tapper during the interview.
Tapper responded, “How do you think it makes little kids with stutters feel when they see you make a comment like that?”
“First and foremost, I had no idea that Joe Biden ever suffered from a stutter. I think what we see on stage with Joe Biden, Jake, is a very clearly a cognitive decline,” Lara Trump said.
“I think you were mocking his stutter. I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline,” Tapper protested.
