Hey Jake Tapper, Have You Noticed Trump Is Old and Unwell?

Dear Jake Tapper,

We have important news to share with you:

The president is ill.

He’s old.

He’s slurring his words. He’s stumbling on the stairs. He’s forgetting people’s names. 

His hands are bruised and his ankles are swollen. 

He no longer makes long public appearances nor speaks at large rallies, nor holds lengthy press conferences. When he does appear, he’s either belligerent or exhausted. 

He’s had medical procedures and hasn’t been honest about them. He said he had “no idea” which part of his body had been scanned in a recent MRI. The White House claimed his tests were “preventative” when those tests don’t prevent anything. 

He’s had days where he disappears from public view. He brags about taking cognitive tests that are only given to dementia patients or people recovering from strokes. 

This president to whom I’m referring, of course, is Donald J. Trump, and we wanted to write to you and let you know what was happening to him, because you haven’t said a word about it. 

It’s odd, because you’ve built a significant body of work on presidential aging: When former President Joe Biden showed signs of slowing down after four backbreaking years of pandemic leadership, you turned his age into a national crisis. In fact, you wrote a whole entire book about it. You titled it Original Sin. 

In TV appearances to promote the book, you and your fellow journalists expressed outrage, incredulity, that a president would conceal information about his health and the impact his age was having on a very demanding job. Here are some things you said on the air: 

“It is very sad what happens to us, if we’re lucky enough to get old. Very few of us retain our acuity until our death in our sleep at age 99. It is the human condition, and that makes it difficult to report on this. But by the same token, we have a right to believe and expect that a president will be sharp and on top of things.”

You said that to NPR, in May 2025, as Donald Trump was announcing, rescinding, and re-announcing nonsensical tariffs on products from overseas, revealing a total lack of understanding of the impact of any of his statements, and in some cases mixing up the countries he intended to punish. 

You told the L.A. Times that Biden and his aides were liars when they insisted that Biden could discharge his presidential duties, that none of the forgetfulness or confusion you accused him of had led him to actually do anything wrong. 

“They weren’t only lying to journalists, they were lying to everybody. People would do reporting and all the great Democratic sources that you could rely on for candor would say, ‘No, we’re told that he’s fine.’ And I think that they all either believed it or had no other facts.”

At the same time, Trump was sending armed gangs into American cities to kidnap and traffic legal immigrants, blowing up innocent fishermen in international waters, alleging they’re “narcotraffickers,” shrugging at the very idea that he’s committing war crimes, and planning a UFC fight match on the White House lawn. 

He had the East Wing of the White House bulldozed for a ballroom funded by “donations” from business leaders who want his support for their ventures. 

His statements make less and less sense even as they grow nastier. He told female reporters they were stupid and to be “quiet, Piggy.” He called Somali immigrants in Minnesota “garbage” and said “I don’t want them in our country.” 

He’s posting dozens of times a night, sometimes angrily but mostly incoherently. He’s sharing AI slop videos and memes. He’s swinging wildly from promoting his own merchandise (Trump watches! Trump coins!) to attacking his perceived enemies online. 

And now, after months of this chaos, as pictures and videos emerge of Trump falling asleep at cabinet meetings and slumping down at his Mar-a-Lago resort lunch ignite all kinds of speculation online, you say … this is no big deal. 

“Look, he’s 79 years old. I mean, like, this is not abnormal for a 79-year-old to be sleepy,” you told CNN viewers about the cabinet episode. 

Where is your outrage about Trump’s obvious infirmity? Why aren’t you insulted when you’re clearly being lied to by White House officials and doctors about the president’s condition, as you alleged during the Biden administration? Where is the constant haranguing of everyone you interview to answer for the president’s health? 

Or have you taken yourself off the presidential aging beat, now that the president is a Republican? 

Your indifference to Trump’s decline in the wake of your indignation over Biden’s health echoes a long history in the corporate press of holding Democrats to standards Republicans are never asked to meet. During the 2016 presidential campaign, reporters and editors went out of their way to characterize Trump’s racism and cruelty as “populism,” while putting everything his opponents said under a microscope. 

When Trump reprised his campaign in 2024, his racism and cruelty were joined by nonsensical, frighteningly violent pronouncements about defying the Constitution, ruling as a king, and accusing immigrants of eating people’s pets. All of that was dismissed as Trump being Trump, while Vice- Presidential candidate Tim Walz was pilloried for mixing up the months of his military service. 

Here’s something else you said, Jake, in that NPR interview we quoted above: 

“The news media is in a crisis. … Reporters in general, CNN, NPR, ABC, CBS, all of us, people don’t trust us. One of the reasons they don’t trust us is what just happened with Joe Biden and his acuity and the fact that we in the media were pretty late to the story.”

You’re awfully late to another story right now. Can we expect a book in 2029, accusing the president of covering up his illnesses? Is that what you’re saving your righteous fury for? 

The point isn’t that Joe Biden was perfectly fine and should have been above questions about his health. 

The point is that Trump is clearly not fine at all, and you know it. And as a journalist, you are failing — and betraying the American people as a result — by refusing to hold this administration to account and asking the most basic and obvious question: Why is a clearly infirmed, elderly, demented man still holding one of the most powerful positions in the world? 

And why is the media so late to this story?