CNN host and Original Sin co-author Jake Tapper took his book tour to HBO and Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday for a surreal discussion with Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton about former President Joe Biden’s mental decline and who was to blame for the coverup. Moulton had just recalled how Biden did not seem to remember who he was while the two were in Normandy. While Moulton was on to tout his role in getting Biden to step aside, he only recalled the incident publicly in July, after Biden’s ultimately career-ending debate in late June, when he became a political liability for Democrats. Still, Maher asked Tapper, “So, you said ‘blame’ before, who do we blame? I feel like people are Yoko-ing the wife. I feel Jill Biden’s getting the Yoko treatment. Maybe she deserves it, but Yoko didn't break up The Beatles.”     Not only did Tapper absolve his co-panelist of any blame, he cleared himself and his fellow journalists, “I think there are any number of people who are part of this decision to hide how bad it was, not only from the media, not only from the public, but also from cabinet officials, from people in the White House, from Democratic lawmakers, I mean, there was a period 2023, 2024 Democratic lawmakers barely saw the president. Yes, I think it was Jill Biden, I also think it's Hunter Biden. I also think President Biden has agency here too, we aren't saying it was Weekend at Bernie’s… Like, he had moments where he was non-functioning, but he understood what was going on. I mean, we saw him earlier today. He can speak and talk, if he were here right now, he’d talk for 10, 15 minutes and be fine.” When Tapper visits conservative outlets on his book tour, he appears to pay lip service to the fact that the media dropped the ball on the topic, but when he’s on more liberal shows, such as Real Time, he appears to portray the media as passive observers who got hoodwinked by the White House into thinking that Biden’s decline was just part of his longer history of gaffes and bloopers. Therefore, it is reasonable to be skeptical that the media will truly change its ways as a result of Tapper’s book. Here is a transcript for the May 30 show: HBO Real Time with Bill Maher 5/30/2025 10:24 PM ET BILL MAHER: So, you said "blame" before, who do we blame? I feel like people are Yoko-ing the wife. I feel Jill Biden’s getting the Yoko treatment. Maybe she deserves it, but Yoko didn't break up The Beatles. JAKE TAPPER: I think there are any number of people who are part of this decision to hide how bad it was, not only from the media, not only from the public, but also from cabinet officials, from people in the White House, from Democratic lawmakers, I mean, there was a period 2023, 2024 Democratic lawmakers barely saw the president.  Yes, I think it was Jill Biden, I also think it's Hunter Biden. I also think President Biden has agency here too, we aren't saying it was Weekend at Bernie’s. MAHER: Of course. TAPPER: He was aware—was going on—no, I’m saying it wasn’t . Like, he had moments where he was non-functioning, but he understood what was going on. I mean, we saw him earlier today. He can speak and talk, if he were here right now, he’d talk for 10, 15 minutes and be fine.

On the Friday edition of ABC’s The View, former Congressman Anthony Weiner seemed to have hit a soft spot with the hosts when he made a joke regarding Kamala Harris’s disaster of an appearance on the show last year while she was on the campaign trail. In the opening moments of the interview, Weiner quipped: “By the way, was this where Kamala Harris was sitting when she blew up her campaign? Was this the spot?” followed with clearly uncomfortable chuckles from the panel and crowd alike.  The faux pas Weiner was referring to was Harris’ terrible answer to, what he termed, “the softest of softball questions.” As a guest on the show in October 2024, the former Vice President was asked by co-host Sunny Hostin if there was anything she would have done differently than Joe Biden. Her answer was a solid and resounding “no,” something that contributed to her eventual loss later that year in November.     In an obvious attempt to save face over the Harris incident, Joy Behar made a point to play the sexism card as an answer to how Harris fumbled the Presidency last election.  BEHAR: But, you know, I'm listening to you now and thinking what do these people have in common: Cuomo, Clinton, Trump, Weiner, Spitzer? They're all men. WEINER: Yeah– BEHAR: They're all men. You talk about– we were talking about this before, about trying to appeal to these men out there. Why is it that two qualified women could not beat all of you guys? Could never– These women can never beat you. They're more qualified than almost anybody on that list, including you– I'm sorry. Weiner pointed out that after Clinton was impeached, he and Cuomo and Spitzer were forced out of office, and stated that they “do pay a price” for their actions. What Weiner did not point out, however, was that Behar’s comparison of Kamala and Hillary “losing” doesn’t make any logical sense, considering that they weren’t running against any of those men, and they all faced some form of consequence. Additionally, the scandals she referred to all came to light after their election, making her point moot. Rather than accept the fact that Kamala was unqualified, The View team doubled down, again, on their Kamala worship, citing the only credible reason that she could ever lose an election is, of course, because America must hate women.  Weiner circled back to his original joke, but this time in a more serious manner, to respond to Behar and critique her point: WEINER: I made a joking reference to the answer she gave on this show, “Is there anything you would do different?” That is the softest of softball– every politician dreams to have that question. You still have to be a good candidate. BEHAR: Yeah, but almost all of these people on this list got away with something and she lost. That's all I'm saying. WEINER: Well– BEHAR: One misstep and she was out. WEINER: Yeah, I mean, I hate to correct you– BEHAR: Oh, go right ahead. WEINER: Bill Clinton was impeached, Eliot Spitzer was thrown out of office, I was thrown out of office, Andrew Cuomo was thrown out of office, so we do pay a price. The question is if you were going to say to those people, how do you judge their record in totality? Weiner may have made the joke, but The View proved the punchline. In trying to defend Harris, the hosts only spotlighted the very thing that sunk her campaign: You have to be a good candidate. The View knew in real time that they had harmed their candidate. They brought on her running mate Governor Tim Walz (D-Minn.) shortly thereafter to do some damage control. Hostin was still carrying the burden of helping sink Harris; she tried to wash her hands of the mess during an interview with former President Biden earlier in the month. The entire transcript is below. Click "expand" to read. ABC’s The View May 30, 2025 11:23:23 a.m. Eastern JOY BEHAR: Now, he's hoping to return to politics in the same office he started his political career: New York City Council. So, please welcome the very contrite Anthony Weiner. [Applause] ANTHONY WEINER: (D-NY): Thank you. BEHAR: Am I right when I say contrite? WEINER: Yes. By the way, was this where Kamala Harris was sitting when she blew up her campaign? Was this the spot? BEHAR: It was right there. WEINER: I hope I don't have the same fate. BEHAR: Yeah. (…) 11:32:35 AM EST BEHAR: But, you know, I'm listening to you now and thinking what do these people have in common: Cuomo, Clinton, Trump, Weiner, Spitzer? They're all men. WEINER: Yeah– BEHAR: They're all men. You talk about– we were talking about this before, about trying to appeal to these men out there. Why is it that two qualified women could not beat all of you guys? Could never– These women can never beat you. They're more qualified than almost anybody on that list, including you– I'm sorry. ALYSSA FARRAH GRIFFITH: Well, New York has a female governor. WEINER: Well, by happenstance. FARRAH GRIFFITH: Yeah. WEINER: I mean, look, I've given this a lot of thought. As you know, I was married for a long time for Huma Abedin who, by the way, sat in– I think she sat in this chair. BEHAR: Yes. SARA HAINES: She’s brilliant. WEINER: She’s amazing. HAINES: Yes. WEINER: She's amazing, and I would watch the standard and she -- we had our courtship during the 2008 campaign, so I was right there up close to watch. The standards that women have to live up to in everything from what they wear, to how they talk, to the intonation, to the inflection. The number of times I heard someone comment about Hillary Clinton's laugh and I have heard Chuck Schumer's laugh– BEHAR: But her email! Her email– WEINER: – Oh, the email, I think there is something to that, the problem is it's a little bit too easy an answer, though. Because, also, there were things that Kamala Harris– I made a joking reference to the answer she gave on this show, “Is there anything you would do different?” That is the softest of softball– every politician dreams that have question. You still have to be a good candidate. BEHAR: Yeah, but almost all of these people on this list got away with something and she lost. That's all I'm saying. WEINER: Well– BEHAR: One misstep and she was out. WEINER: Yeah, I mean, I hate to correct you– BEHAR: Oh, go right ahead. WEINER: Bill Clinton was impeached, Eliot Spitzer was thrown out of office, I was thrown out of office, Andrew Cuomo was thrown out of office, so we do pay a price. The question is if you were going to say to those people, how do you judge their record in totality? I do believe that women get judged much more harshly than men do. I do believe that. BEHAR: That’s right. (...)

New York Times columnist David Brooks did the not-so-clever trick of insisting he wasn’t saying what he was indeed saying on Friday’s edition of PBS News Hour as he reflected back on Elon Musk’s time at DOGE by comparing him to Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and Joseph Stalin. Host Amna Nawaz wondered, “David, how do you look at it? What's his legacy, if we know that yet?” Brooks declared that, “As a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's true.”     He then claimed, “according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in.” At this point, it should be noted that President Trump’s proposed 2026 budget keeps PEPFAR funding steady. With that in mind, Brooks reference to the trio of communist dictators comes across as even more absurd: Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don't think it's the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that's Elon Musk's legacy. And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that. Pol Pot had people murdered because they wore glasses, Mao killed tens of millions of people in a man-made famine and political oppression, and Stalin killed around 4 million Ukrainians in a genocide that modern Russia’s inability to come to terms with Stalin's legacy and how it helped create a separate Ukrainian national identity have resulted in 11 years of bloodshed. Stalin was also responsible for the deaths of millions more through other aspects of his tyrannical rule. Donald Trump and Elon Musk—just like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and others—by contrast, decided to cut foreign aid, and in the one example Brooks cites, it is arguably not even true. Brooks can’t weasel out of it by invoking the trio of genocidal tyrants and then say they are not the same. As Trump goes after PBS’s federal funding, PBS insists that they are not a partisan, left-wing entity, but their main allegedly conservative commentator just made a claim so unbelievably preposterous that one can be justified in resenting having to take it seriously. Yet, because PBS wants conservative tax dollars to subsidize such claims, we must. Here is a transcript for the May 30 show: PBS News Hour 5/30/2025 7:38 PM ET AMNA NAWAZ: David, how do you look at it? What's his legacy, if we know that yet? DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I'm not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you're at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget. So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's true. But according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in. Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don't think it's the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that's Elon Musk's legacy. And the people who work at Tesla and SpaceX may want to think about that.

MSNBC’s host of All In, Chris Hayes, got the facts wrong on Thursday as he criticized Elon Musk, who was preparing to make his way out of office. As a special government employee, Musk was granted only 130 days to lead DOGE in rooting out waste and corruption within the government. In that time, Musk has cut an estimated $175 billion in unnecessary spending across the board. However, Hayes asserted that Musk’s step down had nothing to do with the expiration of his work period, but rather being a result of the fact that “No one likes the guy.”  Hayes huffed that, “Earlier this month, The Atlantic … quotes the General Counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees as saying, quote, ‘We kicked him out of town. If he had stayed in the shadows and done this stuff, who knows how bad it would have been? But no one likes the guy.’” What exactly the American Federation of Government Employees did to ‘kick’ Musk out of the White House remains unclear. But Hayes and other Democrats are confident that his exit from office was nothing other than a complete implosion on his part. As Hayes put it: Did you feel that down into your toes, that full body cringe? Well, Musk is now leaving in disgrace because lots of people felt that way when they were around him. He was wholesale rejected by about everyone. We've seen report after report after report that everyone simply couldn't stand the guy. Doesn't matter how rich he is. Coming hot off the heels of a CBS interview where Musk somewhat distanced himself from President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill proposal, the media was quick to take his words as a sign of the growing tension between Musk and both the President and his Cabinet.     Hayes himself pointed to a New York Times article detailing a disagreement between Musk and several cabinet members including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Reading just a little further into the article, however, reveals that, despite their cabinet meeting argument, at the end of the day, these men could put their differences aside for the good of the nation. The article reads: Tammy Bruce, a spokeswoman for the State Department, responded, ‘Secretary Rubio considered the meeting an open and productive discussion with a dynamic team that is united in achieving the same goal: making America great again.’ In a post on X on Friday, Mr. Duffy praised Mr. Trump and the work Mr. Musk’s team is doing and said it was an effective cabinet meeting. He added that ‘the DEI Department at the FAA was eliminated on day 2’ and that Mr. Trump’s ‘approach of a scalpel versus a hatchet and better coordination between Secretaries and DOGE is the right approach to revolutionizing the way our government is run.’ Believe it or not, disagreements are not what defines politics; it is the ability to compromise, the ability to put aside differences with those you disagree with for the greater good, that makes a good politician. As Musk prepared to leave office, President Trump hosted an event and press conference honoring him on Friday, making it apparent that being “wholesale rejected,” as Hayes put it, was far from the main takeaway of Elon Musk’s time with DOGE. The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read. MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes May 29, 2025 8:05 p.m. EST [ON SCREEN HEADLINE: Elon Musk Departs Washington With His Brand Battered] (…) CHRIS HAYES: I mean, again, you got to just concede it where it is. I mean, this is a guy who is profoundly charismatic, silver tongued, eloquent, amazing communicator. Yes, it is a tough spot to be associated with those toxic Trump policies. Maybe that explains the sudden, massive unpopularity, but this is you, right? [Cuts to video] ELON MUSK: This is the chainsaw for bureaucracy. Chainsaw! [Cuts back to live] HAYES:  HAYES: Did you feel that down into your toes, that full body cringe? Well, Musk is now leaving in disgrace because lots of people felt that way when they were around him. He was wholesale rejected by about everyone. We've seen report after report after report that everyone simply couldn't stand the guy. Doesn't matter how rich he is. Back in March, The New York Times reported on an explosive cabinet meeting where Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins all tore into Musk for his haphazard cuts in their respective agencies.  Earlier this month, The Atlantic reported on an expletive-ridden screaming match between Musk and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that spilled out from the Oval Office into more public areas of the West Wing.  That same article also quotes the General Counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees as saying, quote, “We kicked him out of town. If he had stayed in the shadows and done this stuff, who knows how bad it would have been? But no one likes the guy.” “No one likes the guy” might be the best summation of Musk's forays into American politics I've encountered. His Waterloo, sort of electorally speaking, came in April. Remember that, in the State of Wisconsin? Remember what he did there?  Guy thought he was so popular, that he was such a good politician himself that he flew in from out of state and wore a cheesehead and flexed his newfound political muscles in the State Supreme Court race. And he spent a small fortune of his own money in support of the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel. And it didn't work. His candidate lost by ten points, and voters, they really didn't like Musk. (…)

As NPR faces the prospect of being defunded by conservatives, ABC's The View marked Jewish American Heritage Month by honoring former NPR anchor Susan Stamberg and NPR reporter Nina Totenberg, touted as the 'Queen of Leaks,' meaning leaks from Democrats seeking to damage Republicans. Over treacly music, Sarah Haines hailed Stamberg as the first female anchor of a national broadcast news program (All Things Considered) with a “neutral and relatable tone.” Then she gushed over Totenberg for winning seven awards from the American Bar Association, as if that group isn’t a gaggle of Democrats.  Haines oozed that “Nina was dubbed the Queen of Leaks by Vanity Fair” is also being honored by a pile of leftists. So today, it's time to review how Totenberg & Co. were partisans the whole time. In reality, Totenberg has been a queen of leaks from Democrats seeking to damage Republican Supreme Court picks. She succeeded in ruining Douglas Ginsburg in 1987, and in the cited article in Vanity Fair, they explained how Totenberg made an agreement to credit Legal Times for breaking news, but they she refused to give them credit on air. Sleazy.  Totenberg failed to get Thomas in 1991, but after she dragged Anita Hill out into the open to testify, she repeatedly showed her agenda in live coverage of the Hill-Thomas hearings. She touted the wonderful accomplishments of leaks, and constantly touted Hill's credibility and so-called corroborating witnesses. She relished the unproven claims of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers in 2018. But she and the "public" media never made trouble for Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She wrote an entire book relating how she and Ginsburg were the best of pals in a book titled Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships. When Paula Jones came forward in 1994 and accused Bill Clinton of crude sexual harassment (involving indecent exposure), Totenberg suggested Jones was in it for the money. (Anita Hill signed a two-book deal with Doubleday in 1993 for an estimated $1 million plus.) NPR had no serious interest in 1999 when Juanita Broaddrick went on Dateline NBC and asserted Bill Clinton raped her at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. While NPR’s Nina Totenberg broke Anita Hill’s unproven charges into the mainstream press, she had no story on Broaddrick. NPR broadcast only one report on Morning Edition on February 25th, the day after the NBC interview.  Now remember, a White House spokesperson confirmed Wednesday that President Trump will send Congress a promised $9.4 billion rescissions package next week, seeking to claw back about $1.1 billion in advance funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This is inspired by decades of leftist propaganda and double standards.  These tales can be found in an ancient paperback titled Public Broadcasting & The Public Trust, edited by David Horowitz and Laurence Jarvik. We all wrote critiques of public broadcasting for what they called The Committee for Media Integrity.  Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.