Jake Tapper > Quotes

“No president likes leaks, but it’s worth noting candidate Trump’s path to power was tread on a road of leaks. He didn’t have a problem with leaks then. It’s not a moral position if you only hold it when it applies to you.”
― Jake Tapper

“The human soul isn't sold once but rather slowly and methodically and piece by piece.”
― Jake Tapper, The Hellfire Club

“As Kolenda saw it, none of what he was doing had anything to do with being warmhearted. In his opinion, counterinsurgency was a pretty damned cold-blooded strategy, all about being out there with specific goals—establishing stability and defeating the insurgency—and intelligently using the full range of available leverage, from cash, clean water, and education for local children to bullets, when appropriate, to get the desired results. There was an element of manipulation involved. Sure, he wanted the Afghans to have better lives—how could anyone not, after seeing that kind of impoverishment? But there was also something transactional about American promises of clean water, construction jobs, and a brighter future for Afghan kids. This wasn’t charity; the bottom line was, these offers were made to save American lives and help destroy anyone who hoped to hurt ISAF troops. Kolenda could never understand why some folks viewed the carrots as being somehow inferior to the sticks.”
― Tapper, Jake, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“If there’s a world with ghosts, shouldn’t we be constantly walking through hundreds of apparitions of just regular old people?”
― Jake Tapper, The Hellfire Club

“Army studies indicate that if a wounded soldier arrives alive at a combat support hospital where surgeons and nurses can treat him, the chances of his surviving are extremely high—greater than 90 percent. “Surviving,” of course, doesn’t necessarily entail keeping arms or legs or retaining the ability to function independently back home. The leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield is bleeding. Having a leg blown off by an IED, for instance, can be fatal if quick steps are not taken to control the blood loss. Even deadlier is internal bleeding, a problem for which medics generally don’t have a good answer. A soldier who is bleeding internally needs to be evacuated and delivered to a surgeon immediately if he is to have any hope of survival. The second-leading cause of preventable death is something called tension pneumothorax. If a bullet punctures a soldier’s lung, air can leak from that hole into the “pleural space,” or cavity outside the lungs. That air can build up and eventually interfere with the functioning of the heart. This can be a relatively simple problem to correct: a medic can simply stick a big needle in the soldier’s chest to relieve the pressure in the pleural space.”
― Tapper, Jake, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“What his time in Afghanistan was teaching him was that there needed to be better reasons, stronger threats to national security, before the United States deployed its sons and daughters. The abstract threat of terror was not enough,”
― Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“Dusk came earlier in the valley than in places outside the mountains’ muscular shadows.”
― Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“I am sure because I am confident in the idea of the United States of America. I believe that the combination of checks and balances and a free press and our democratically elected representatives will expose charlatans. I believe in the good sense of the American people, and I know in my soul that truth will win out.”
― Jake Tapper, The Hellfire Club

“Then there was the Trumpiness of it all. A candidate just didn’t get a whole lot out of debating Trump. Even if you were beating his ass, you would lose part of your soul in that debate. Trump was such a pathological liar that it was hard for anyone to maintain the nature of what they imagined themselves to be. Trump always took you down with him.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Many troops were far more proficient in PowerPoint than they were with firearms, so”
― Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“Snyder had been running his twelve-man Special Forces team out of Naray since January. He conducted his operations with a palpable intensity, haunted by the ghosts of nineteen Americans—fellow special-operations troops—who’d been killed before he even arrived.”
― Tapper, Jake, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“

BIDEN: “Look, folks,” the president told the adoring crowd after his wife handed him the microphone, “you know, there, uh — I shouldn’t say this, but my brother always uses lines from movies. There was a famous movie by John Wayne, and— and he’s working for the, uh, the Northern military, trying to get the Apaches back on the reservation, and they were lying like hell to him. And they’re all sitting on a bluff, and John Wayne was sitting with two Indian — they were, they were tr — Apaches. And one of them looked at John Wayne and said, ‘These guys are nothing but lying, dog-faced pony soldiers.’ ”

The crowd roared and laughed.
“Except, Trump’s just a liar,” Biden added.
No such line was ever said in any John Wayne movie.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“During an eight-day, grueling bus tour in Iowa in December 2019, Biden gave his aides pause. While doing prep, he struggled to remember the name of longtime aide Mike Donilon. “You know, you know,” he said, groping for it. His aides side-eyed one another—Donilon had worked with Biden since 1981. It wasn’t the only time aides worried during the 2020 presidential primary.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“When our wars are determined not by the threat of Nazism or racism or Communism but by the influence on policy-makers of those those who stand to reap financial benefits from the use of these arms - that, Charlie, is my biggest fear for this country.”
― Jake Tapper, The Hellfire Club

“She’d always found animals easier to understand than humans; they were so refreshingly straightforward and real.”
― Jake Tapper, The Devil May Dance

“depends entirely upon pleasing that one man.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Hur spent several months looking for work.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“So what do we as a country do to ensure that this will never happen again? Congress could legally require the president’s physician to certify to Congress that the commander in chief is physically and cognitively fit to serve. “Currently, the yearly letter from the president’s doctor is basically a tradition,” Reiner says, adding that some White House physicians have provided very detailed presidential health summaries for the public, while others, such as those in the first”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Biden had framed his entire presidency as a pitched battle to prevent Trump from returning to the Oval Office. By not relinquishing power and being honest with himself and the country about his decline, he guaranteed it.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, so goes an old saying President John F. Kennedy invoked after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Few Democrats were running around claiming paternity of the political wipeout that was the 2024 campaign. No one thought that the Harris campaign had been without error. But for the most knowledgeable Democratic officials and donors, and for top members of the Harris campaign, there was no question about the father of this election calamity: It was Joe Biden.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“hard,” the aide to the European leader told”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Nikki Haley said: “The Senate is the most privileged nursing home in the country…. You have to know when to leave.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Reiner feels strongly that “the White House has a responsibility to the public to tell the whole truth about the health of the president. Without that, there can be no trust. Omitting a material diagnosis (such as cognitive impairment or frank dementia) violates that responsibility.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“The original sin of Election 2024 was Biden’s decision to run for reelection—followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Rolling in apace were horror stories about the real-world results of strict antiabortion laws in states where, either by design or confusion, miscarrying women were denied lifesaving care. For any Democratic candidate, this should have been easy.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Many people worked for Biden because they believed he was committed to the judicial norms that Trump had broken.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“Well, you know what they say: One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”
― Jake Tapper, The Hellfire Club

“After the debate, much would be made about the number of audacious lies told by Trump, and rightly so. Trump falsely claimed he “had the greatest economy in the history of our country,” continued to mislead the public about undocumented migrants being sent to the US from South American asylums and prisons, and lied about January 6, describing it as “a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol and in many cases were ushered in by the police.”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“March 2, he forgot the words of the Declaration of Independence:”
― Jake Tapper, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again

“You go through more bestsellers than a McCarthy bonfire.”
― Jake Tapper, The Hellfire Club