Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s announcement that he has aggressive prostate cancer has derailed Democrats’ nascent effort to acknowledge where they went wrong on his presidency and 2024 candidacy, as the party wrestles with a complicated mix of sympathy and unsettling new questions about his health.
In recent days, prominent Democrats had begun to self-examine their role championing Mr. Biden’s re-election bid despite his signs of aging and voters’ clear preference for a younger candidate. Some accused him and his top aides of concealing his mental and physical decline, setting up a last-minute candidate switch that culminated in Democrats’ defeat.
Now, top Democrats’ conversation about Mr. Biden has shifted to well wishes and statements of concern for the former president, whose office said on Sunday that he had a serious form of cancer that has spread to his bones. The grim development has made recriminations about his role in his party’s calamitous 2024 loss appear disrespectful, pausing efforts by younger leaders to treat the subject with new honesty.
On Monday morning, Mr. Biden expressed gratitude for the outpouring of sympathy, sharing a photo on social media of him smiling next to his wife, Jill, and their cat, Willow. He thanked supporters for “lifting us up with love and support.”
Yet the reaction to Mr. Biden’s disclosure also demonstrated how his legacy has been altered by his decision to run for re-election as the oldest president in history.
Mixed in with the prayers were a few whispered uncertainties that reflected a lingering lack of trust in what he and those closest to him say about his health. Text chains among Democrats who worked on the 2024 campaign lit up with questions: When did he learn he had prostate cancer? What if he had stayed in last year’s race and won?
Former Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who ran a long-shot bid challenging Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination last year, suggested that the former president had timed the announcement of his diagnosis to deflect the growing wave of criticism from within the party.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that this was announced this week,” Mr. Phillips said in an interview. “It’s hard to comport otherwise.”
He went so far as to equate efforts by Mr. Biden and his aides to hide signs of his decline to the actions of the Republican president.
“Donald Trump isn’t shy about his corruption,” Mr. Phillips said. “What’s so troubling is that what the people around Joe Biden clearly were doing was in some ways more egregious.”
Mr. Biden’s spokesman, Chris Meagher, declined to comment.
President Trump, for his part, set aside his frequent attacks on Mr. Biden to “wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.” But other Republicans, including Donald Trump Jr., quickly concluded — despite a lack of immediate evidence — that Democrats covered up Mr. Biden’s cancer while he occupied the White House.
It wasn’t just conservatives who had questions.
In interviews with the news media, some physicians raised the idea that Mr. Biden could have known about his condition while in office, saying it was surprising that the president — who has access to some of the best health care in the country — would not have learned about his cancer earlier.
“He did not develop it in the last 100 to 200 days,” Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist who served as an adviser on the coronavirus pandemic for the Biden administration, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.
“I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that,” added Dr. Emanuel, who noted that both Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had reported being tested for prostate cancer.
Some Democratic lawmakers and strategists have argued that the party’s record-low approval ratings stem in part from a widespread belief that top leaders concealed Mr. Biden’s age-related decline. They have urged elected Democrats to publicly reckon with their long-running support of him.
The cancer revelation came after a difficult few days for Mr. Biden, who has largely shied away from the public eye since leaving office. Last week began with the first excerpts from a new book, “Original Sin,” that details his forgetfulness as president and efforts by his aides to hide his limitations.
The week ended with the release on Saturday of the full five-hour, 10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden in October 2023. That recording, published by Axios, prompted fresh scrutiny of the former president’s jumbled thoughts and his struggle to recall details, including what year he left the vice presidency and the year that his son Beau died.
In a few interviews since his defeat, Mr. Biden and his aides have blamed party leaders and donors for pushing him out of the 2024 race and have suggested that he would have won re-election. The former president insisted on ABC’s “The View” this month that voters did not want him to drop out.
And as recently as hours before his Sunday announcement, some of Mr. Biden’s closest allies had suggested that he would have been fit to serve a second term.
“I never saw anything that would allow me to think that Joe Biden was not able to do that job,” Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina told the CNN host Jake Tapper, one of the authors of “Original Sin,” which is set for release on Tuesday. “None of us thought that there was anything here that created any suspicions of any prolonged condition.”
Mr. Phillips argued that this kind of commitment to an individual candidate, rather than what is best for the nation, was destroying trust in American politics — for both parties.
“If there’s one word that just comes out of this whole episode as it relates to Trump world and Biden world, it’s the poison of loyalty in democracy,” he said. “Loyalty to a person rather than a constitution.”
Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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