Next Up with Mark Halperin
Journalistic Corruption Continues with "Original Sin" Tour, and Charlie Kirk on What MAGA Wants Next
15 May 2025
Mark Halperin dives into the latest twists in the "Original Sin" Biden book rollout, Jake Tapper's changing PR strategy, how the media keeps failing as it misses more opportunities to win back trust with the audience, the "journalistic corruption" at CNN as Brian Stelter misses the real story in his coverage, and more. Then Meghan McCain, host of "Citizen McCain" on 2WAY, joins to talk about how Jake Tapper writing this Biden cognitive decline book is like O.J. Simpson writing "If I Did It," the McCain family relationship with the Bidens, how to fix the media, and more. Then Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk joins to talk about how the MAGA grassroots movement works, what MAGA thinks of the "big beautiful bill" coming up for a vote soon, their priorities and what they don't care about, the Bannon wing of the party vs. the GOP establishment, what he'd say to a meeting with Kamala Harris, the future of media, and more.
Full Episode
Greetings, everybody. Welcome back to What is Next. I'm Mark Halpern, Editor-in-Chief at Two-Way, and so happy to have you here. We're happy and grateful we're a new program, and we're off to a pretty quick start. Because of you, those of you who've listened previously or watched previously, we're now the number four top podcast, new podcast, according to the Associated Press and Apple.
And we're the top new news in the news category. And again, we couldn't be more grateful to you as we start out here. So thank you for being part of it. And again, you can watch us on YouTube and you can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts, as they say. Today, also grateful to have Charlie Kirk.
uh of turning point uh usa here to join us to talk about everything uh maga and uh what's going on in the country great guy appear on his program regularly and he's returning the favor today and megan mccain will be here and megan and i are colleagues at two-way megan has a great interest in the topic we're going to spend some of our time talking about today which is
This issue of Joe Biden's cognitive decline and how that story was allowed to play out the way it did. Megan has known the Biden family for years and she knows Jake Tapper, the reporter who's one of the two who wrote the new book that's being discussed elsewhere in a year. She knows them both well and she's got strong feelings about it. So Megan will be here to talk about that.
We're going to talk about Joe Biden and this issue of cognitive decline. And I know a lot of people are going to say, why not talk about Donald Trump and all the controversies involving Donald Trump? Those are important and interesting, too. And they're discussed elsewhere. And I'll continue to hold the Trump administration accountable and to cover that.
But the reason why I'm continuing to talk about this story. about Joe Biden is because there's no way to hold Donald Trump accountable if two institutions in this country aren't capable of doing it because they don't have the credibility. That's the media, my colleagues in the media, and that's the Democratic Party. Every one of you should want those two institutions to have credibility.
even if you don't like the Democrats. And we know that those two organizations don't have credibility. That's true for a lot of reasons with a lot of people. The media is probably at an all-time low in terms of lack of credibility. And there's a new Associated Press poll out this week that shows people not particularly optimistic, including Democrats, about the future of that party.
Democrats don't have no credibility, but they don't have enough. And that's part of why Donald Trump is not held accountable the way he should be. And so now's the time
with this new book coming out next week, to use it as an opportunity not to engage in whitewashes, not to engage in the same kind of lack of truth that existed during this entire saga of the question of Joe Biden's cognitive decline. Now is the time to get people in my business to recognize there's a credibility problem and for Democrats to do it also.
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