Who is Jake Tapper and where did he go to college? Is he Republican or Democrat?
Two award-winning CNN hosts will moderate the first 2024 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Here is a look at Jake Tapper.
Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the first presidential debate of 2024 between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sponsored by CNN. The debate will take place on Thursday 27 June at 9 pm ET, which will be simulcast on nearly every network.
The moderators will be looking to keep this first debate between the two bitter rivals from devolving into what Tapper called the first debate of 2020, “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck.” Thursday’s debate will not be the first time that the two have moderated together this year, having done the 2024 GOP Primary Debate before the Iowa caucuses.
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Who is Jake Tapper?
Both moderators are award-winning journalists who also co-host CNN’s ‘State of the Union’, which airs Sunday mornings. Long-time member of the journalistic team at CNN, Bash was brought on when Tapper’s duties at the network were further expanded after the 2021 inauguration of Biden. That year he became the Chief Washington Correspondent for the network.
His career at the Atlanta-based cable news channel dates back to January 2013 when he began hosting his own program on CNN ‘The Lead with Jake Tapper’, a two-hour weekday news program on a variety of topics which airs in the afternoon. Prior to CNN, he had worked at ABC, and was interim host of ‘This Week’ for several months in 2010.
He began his full-time journalism career in 1998 writing for the Washington City Paper. He has also worked at Salon and written articles and columns for TALK Magazine, New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Weekly Standard, and other publications. As well he was a frequent contributor to NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’. He became ABC’s Senior White House Correspondent the day after the 2008 presidential election.
He has won numerous awards including the White House Correspondents’ Association Merriman Smith Memorial Award for presidential coverage under deadline pressure three years straight between 2010 and 2012, two Emmy awards for ‘The Lead’ and the 2017 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism.
Where did Jake Tapper go to college? Is he Republican or Democrat?
He graduated from Dartmouth College, of which he is now a trustee, in 1991 as a Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude with a BA in History.
Tapper is known for his “ability to hold Republicans and Democrats to account equally” which has kept him at the top of Mediaite ranking of TV-based journalists in America. He declares that he doesn’t belong to any political party.
Even so, Trump and his surrogates have been trying to paint him and his co-moderator Bash as anti-Trump ahead of the debate. On the one hand to ‘work the refs’ and the other to lower the bar for success. The last time around in 2020, Trump wasn’t deemed to have won either of the debates against Biden.