The real reason Biden ‘suddenly’ has cancer

OPINION:

After President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race last summer following his disastrous debate performance, his press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, held a briefing in the White House.

Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked the obvious question on everyone’s mind: “It would seem that people in this White House knew that Mr. Biden was slipping and it was hidden from the American people. So, who ordered White House officials to cover up a declining president?”

With a smug and dismissive smirk, the flack spat: “I know that this is a narrative that you love. … First of all, there’s been no cover-up. I want to be very clear about that.”

But that was — as was possibly nearly everything else that ever came out of Ms. Jean-Pierre’s mouth — a bald-faced lie. There was absolutely a full-blown cover-up operation in the White House to hide from the American people the fact that Mr. Biden was fading fast, both physically and mentally.

It has been just 120 days since Mr. Biden left office, but here’s what we now know about the former president: His mental acuity was severely impaired; he was so physically frail that his aides began planning for him to use a wheelchair if he got reelected; and he has had prostate cancer for perhaps a decade, during his entire term as president.

Let’s start with the cancer. Presidents get extraordinary health care. Every year, presidents traipse off to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which runs an exhaustive, daylong battery of tests. As Democrats and their lapdogs in the media try to claim that men older than 70 often don’t get prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests, it’s beyond stupid to think that the president wouldn’t get one. It’s a simple blood test.

Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist who worked as a COVID-19 adviser to the Biden White House, was among the first to say that Mr. Biden didn’t just find out he had cancer. “He’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading. He did not develop it the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president, he probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.”

Then there was the release of audio recordings of Mr. Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. The tapes, which were kept private by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland, show that Mr. Biden was loopy, suffering memory lapses, stumbling over words and taking long pauses followed by nonsensical sentences.

In his final report after a probe into claims that Mr. Biden mishandled classified documents, Mr. Hur decided not to press charges, saying, “At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The tapes point to something far sadder: Mr. Biden was already mostly gone mentally, barely coherent and hardly cognizant.

And there’s the new book by “journalists” Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, in which the authors write, “Biden’s physical deterioration — most apparent in his halting walk — had become so severe that there were internal discussions about putting the president in a wheelchair, but they couldn’t do so until after the election.”

For the CNN reporter and the Axios reporter, it was all brand new. They had been reporting on Mr. Biden for years, but suddenly, when they were making even more money to write a book, they did some reporting and found out that Mr. Biden was not at all OK.

The whole intent of the cover-up is clear, as is the reason for trotting out Mr. Biden’s cancer just now: to mute all the talk about the White House cover-up and draw sympathy. “I think those conversations are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now, as he’s struggling through this,” said David Axelrod, an adviser to President Obama and Mr. Biden.

Of all the revelations about Mr. Biden’s terrible mental and physical state, he said, “This supersedes all of that, obviously.”

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, apparently reading off the same talking points, came out Tuesday and said, “It seems to me entirely inappropriate at this moment in time, when President Biden is dealing with a serious and aggressive form of cancer, there are Republicans peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward.”

But one Democrat, CNN commentator and former Obama adviser Van Jones, had the strength to speak the truth, saying that what Team Biden did was “a crime against this republic. I think the Democrats are going to pay for a long time for being a part of what is now being revealed to be a massive cover-up.”

• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.