The Mirror

Cartoonist, TV Anchor, And Now Novelist: Jake Tapper Wants It All

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Betsy Rothstein Gossip blogger
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One thing CNN’s Jake Tapper isn’t lacking these days is fame.

Over the weekend, SNL spoofed him in a racy scene with an actor playing President Trump‘s counselor Kellyanne Conway. The scene was taken straight from Fatal Attraction, the 1987 film in which Glenn Close plays a psychotic woman who got involved with a married man played by Michael Douglas.

Tapper, the host of CNN’s “The Lead,” has been commissioned by Little, Brown and Company to write a novel, a thriller set to publish in 2018, according to the AP.

The book’s title is The Hellfire Club and involves a congressman and his zoologist wife.

He’s somehow going to incorporate historical figures like Joe McCarthy, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

Back in 1998, Tapper famously went on a date with Monica Lewinsky and wrote a story about it for Washington City Paper.

He wrote pointedly that Lewinsky was not a bimbo. His date with her was a few weeks before her life exploded with news that she’d been romantically involved with then-President Bill Clinton.

“I hesitate here, because I have no desire to appear on Hard Copy or banter with MSNBCeebees, and, essentially, I feel bad for poor Monica and feel unclean adding my feeble barnacle to her ship of fame,” Tapper wrote. “Although I will admit to an odd weave of loathing and envy when I watch the blabbocracy breathlessly weighing in—Hey, I think, they don’t even know this chick. But I am not jumping in because one dinner with Monica enabled me to read her mind as she sits with friends and family at the Watergate, pondering her fate. I write, clearly, because I want a piece of this story just like everybody else.” 

To answer the obvious question, no, he never hooked up with her. But he thought about it.

“To be brutally honest, I got with her because I figured that behind her initial aggressiveness lurked an easy, perhaps winning, bit of no-frills hookup. Nothing of the kind happened, so either I am eminently resistible (which is certainly within the realm of possibility) or Monica is not the tart she is being made out to be.”

All of this is to say Tapper is capable of writing sex and intrigue.

Hopefully his novel won’t be a nerdfest cleared by the likes of Jeff Zucker.