I’m wishing Joe Biden and his family the strength they’ll need after the former president’s cancer diagnosis—and, like many others, I’m also wondering why his condition wasn’t caught sooner. A similar question could be asked of Bill Clinton: Medical tests near the end of Clinton’s presidency showed elevated levels of cholesterol and blood pressure, foreshadowing a quadruple bypass operation three years later that saved his life. Could the issue have been caught sooner? And should it have been by White House doctors?
Clinton blamed genetics (the men in his family were not long lived) and careless eating habits. He moved forward as a vegetarian; it wasn’t that big a deal. But then Clinton wasn’t a favorite punching bag for his successor, George W. Bush, who wished him well and left it at that.
That’s what President Trump should have done. Instead, he couldn’t resist adding fuel to the fire and suggesting that figures in Biden’s White House knew he had cancer, that they covered it up, and that Biden had been “out of it” for years, incapable of doing his all-important job.
We should be asking questions about Biden—what he and his handlers knew about his health and when they knew it. But we shouldn’t let the current president off the hook. After all, we know less about Trump’s health than any other modern president.
Biden’s cancer announcement was a shock because only seven percent of men are diagnosed with prostate cancer at such a late stage that it has metastasized into the bones.
Republicans say they will subpoena Biden’s White House doctor, Kevin O’Connor, to testify before Congress. O’Connor issued detailed reports on his annual assessment of Biden, notably attributing Biden’s stiff gait to a foot injury suffered when he was playing with his dog. Any suggestion the president might be in the early stages of Parkinson’s or another movement disorder was shut down.
There was no mention in those reports of giving Biden a PSA (Prostate-specific Antigen) test, where an elevated level would indicate the presence of cancer. The test is no longer routine for men over 70 but is recommended for any male expecting ten more years of life. The last PSA test administered to Biden was in 2014.
What is the truth? How incapacitated was Biden? According to “Original Sin,” a new book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, aides considered having Biden take a cognitive test in early 2024 but feared it would draw more attention to his age. There is no evidence that Biden’s age-related decline directly resulted in issues with his overall performance as president, but it should have been obvious to the people closest to him that he was in no shape to campaign and serve the country for another four years, if he could win—and that was another looming question.
(Trump says it’s “sad” about Biden, and he’s right about that. Biden’s legacy should have how he pulled the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic and got the economy rolling again with 17 million jobs and more bipartisan legislation since LBJ. Instead, it’s the story of a White House staff that blew it, lacking in trust for their own President—and the American people.)
But covering up health issues at the presidential level is not new. JFK suffered from Addison’s disease and other undisclosed ailments. Reagan’s staff covered for him when signs of Alzheimer’s appeared, even as he joked about the illness meaning you met new people all the time. And there are no real guardrails to monitor presidential health and fitness. The 25th amendment allows the sitting vice president to stand in for a president who is incapacitated for a brief period, but the bar is so high for agreement to remove a president that it’s next to impossible. The vice president and half the Cabinet would have to agree, and Congress would have to ratify their decision
“Ideally Congress would create a sober, bipartisan commission to investigate ways to maintain transparency about the president’s health, mental and physical,” The Washington Post‘s editorial board argued this week.
Good luck with that. Congress couldn’t even agree to prevent a convicted felon who had been impeached twice from running for the highest office in the land for a third time.
Right now, the only safeguard are the aides around a president on whom we depend upon to blow the whistle if all is not well. When President Nixon was in the throes of Watergate and drinking heavily, Henry Kissinger and other top officials made sure any irrational commands made to the Defense Department were ignored. Perhaps something similar happened in Trump’s first term, which is why he has such animosity toward the generals and admirals that served him in the past.
Even so, relying on top aides to pull the plug can be a fool’s errand. “What do you expect from hacks and flacks?” posited Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman, arguing the people around Biden were just doing their job—presenting him in his best light.
With an aging population in Congress, there are likely to be more cover-ups, though few as consequential as the one that set up the country for a president who doesn’t believe in cover-ups. Trump does everything outrageous out in the open for all to see.
The post Opinion: Controversy Over Biden’s Tragic Diagnosis Highlights the Rotten Nature of U.S. Politics appeared first on The Daily Beast.
