This weekend’s revelation that Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer has deflected some of the attention from what had been the latest big story regarding the former president: the alleged cover-up of his deteriorating cognition during his time in the White House.
Not to be insensitive to the 82-year-old Biden’s health problems, but if anything, the cancer diagnosis further confirms that the former president has been experiencing for some time the physical and mental decline that is common for a person of his age — and that he, his family members and the rest of his inner circle should not have ignored those signs when they made the decision to run for reelection in 2024 and, thus, propel Donald Trump to a second term.
Had Biden stuck to being a one-term president and announced early-on that he would not be running again, the Democrats would have gone through the full nomination process and perhaps fielded a stronger candidate than Kamala Harris. But by the time Biden dropped out under pressure from his own party, following an embarrassingly awful debate performance against Trump in June 2024, it was too late to pick anyone other than Harris.
Nevertheless, it’s an exaggeration to claim there was a “cover-up” within the Biden camp and Democratic hierarchy to fool the American people about Biden’s condition prior to and during the 2024 campaign. His loyalists certainly limited Biden’s public appearances and his press conferences, and they glossed over concerns raised even by some of the Democrat’s supporters. CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson document much of this in their just-released book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which has put the Biden team back on the defensive.
If it was a “cover-up,” however, it was one of the least effective attempts to conceal in presidential history. The American people had plenty of evidence from Biden’s slow and sometimes stumbling gait and his regularly jumbled phrasing when he spoke without a script that he was too old and unfit for another four years in the extremely stressful job.
Some would argue, in fact, that Biden’s limitations were obvious not just in 2024 but also in 2020, when he defeated Trump.
Writing this week in The Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim, a former Republican speechwriter, recalled Biden’s visit to Swaim’s home state of South Carolina prior to the pivotal 2020 primary win that led to Biden’s eventual nomination.
Swaim said the experience of covering Biden’s campaign appearances in South Carolina left him wondering whether Biden had had a stroke or a heart attack. The candidate’s voice was barely audible, he said “North Carolina” several times when he meant to say “North Charleston,” the South Carolina town where he was speaking, and he kept a crowd waiting for two hours while he was holed up in a nearby campaign bus. Then that night, speaking briefly at an annual gathering of South Carolina Democrats, Biden concluded his remarks thusly: “My name’s Joe Biden. I’m a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate. Look me over. If you like what you see, help out. If not, vote for the other Biden.”
Those examples and others like it during two campaigns and a four-year presidency left no one deceived about Biden’s frailties other than those who wanted to be deceived, including those who voted for him in 2020 and were prepared to do so again in 2024.
As Swaim justifiably concludes, “A few of the party’s powerbrokers might have snapped the delusion that Joe Biden was ever well enough to serve as president. But the obstinate fact is that a large majority of Democratic voters preferred the delusion, and their leaders saw no reason to upset them.”
