The lies about Biden’s health have done untold damage

The final few years of Joe Biden’s political career will be the period he’s most keen to forget – a fate he shares with most US presidents. The end of Biden’s tenure was marred by his public cognitive decline and the desperate attempts by White House staffers to conceal it. It ended in him being dumped by his own party as its presidential nominee. Now, months after Biden left the Oval Office, misfortune has thrust him back under the brutal spotlight of the US media.

It has been revealed that the former president has stage-four prostate cancer. The diagnosis is so severe that the cancer has spread to the bone, and is reported to have a Gleason score of nine, meaning that it is highly aggressive. ‘Thank you for lifting us up with love and support’, Biden said in a post on Monday, where he was pictured smiling with his wife, Jill. But the sombre look on the former first lady’s face said it all. Tragically, the odds for recovery look very slim indeed.

Usually, a politician’s cancer diagnosis would be a moment for their opponents to demonstrate a bit of humanity. Indeed, even Donald Trump wished his two-time presidential rival a ‘fast and successful recovery’ (before adding that he had ‘aced’ his own, recent physical examination). But any goodwill towards Biden has quickly given way to accusations of a cover-up – that is, the claim that he and his team must have known about the cancer long before now, but kept it secret so as not to affect his (abortive) bid for a second presidential term.

Such claims are not confined to the conspiratorial fringes of the internet. They even feature in the pages of the New York Times – a newspaper that was so pro-Biden during his presidency it might as well have been edited by his wife. For it to now be reporting such claims is telling.

Normally, such speculation about a public figure’s ill-health would be considered deeply disrespectful, a gross invasion of his or her privacy. That such norms are ceasing to apply in Biden’s case is down to the behaviour of the Democrats and their media cheerleaders. Their attempted cover-up of Biden’s mental and physical decline during his presidency is fuelling people’s suspicion about the current state of his health. After all, if Biden and his aides didn’t tell Americans the truth about his health then, why should they think they are telling the truth about his cancer diagnosis only being apparent now?

The news also comes at a time when more and more media insiders are spilling the beans on the scale of the cover-up of Biden’s decline. New book Original Sin, co-authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, reveals the extent of Biden’s deterioration in shocking detail. They claim Biden relied on note cards and teleprompters, even in private cabinet meetings, and that staff used multiple cameras to edit out mistakes or cover up gaffes on videos. They report that Biden failed to recognise public figures, including superstar George Clooney, despite having known them for years.

And then there’s the full audio recording and transcript of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with Biden from October 2023, which has just been published by Axios. Hur was questioning Biden in order to establish the facts around his retention of classified documents in the garage of his home in Delaware when he was vice-president. The full interview is genuinely shocking. Then president Biden was unable to remember when his son died, which year he left office as vice-president, or why he had the classified documents (some concerned military policy in Afghanistan) in the first place. After the interview, Hur described Biden as an ‘elderly man with a poor memory’, and decided the Department of Justice shouldn’t press charges. Listening to the recording, one can see why he arrived at that conclusion.

At the time, the Democrats organised for Biden’s personal physician to release a report describing the president as a ‘healthy, active and robust 81-year-old’, fit to be president ‘without any exemptions or accommodations’. This was disingenuous to put it mildly.

Again and again, the Democrats and their media outriders insisted to the American public that Biden was mentally and physically as fit as a fiddle. They claimed that the real videos of Biden looking vacant and confused were ‘deep fakes’. They asserted, in spite of his falls and semi-permanent brain fog, that he was in perfect health. They were willing to help Biden win a second term while secretly discussing plans for him to use a wheelchair if he did so.

This is a genuine scandal. In their attempts to cling on to power, the Democrats were prepared to exploit a frail old man. And so they covered up Biden’s incapacity, and the media willingly let them do so.

Biden and his family should be left to deal with his cancer diagnosis in private. But that doesn’t look like it’s going to be possible – all thanks to the cynicism and opportunism of his Democratic handlers, and a complicit US media.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.