By Nick Catoggio
Monday, May 19, 2025
In a better world, Joe
Biden’s cancer diagnosis would be a moment to wish him well and leave
things there. But we live in the world that he and his inner circle created, in
which there’s no longer a reason to assume good faith when they have something
to say about the former president’s health.
So, for once, conspiratorial
populists are justified in “just asking questions” about the timing of the
disclosure.
The world learned on Sunday that Biden has stage 4
prostate cancer that’s “metastasized to the bone.” In February 2024, the White
House physician pronounced him “fit
for duty” after an annual physical and noted that the findings had been
reviewed by specialists in “optometry, dentistry, orthopedics (foot and ankle),
orthopedics (spine), physical therapy, neurology, sleep medicine, cardiology,
radiology and dermatology.” That list doesn’t include oncology, interestingly,
despite the fact that Biden had a cancerous
skin lesion removed in 2023.
On Monday, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, appeared
on Morning Joe to discuss the new diagnosis. Emanuel isn’t a right-wing
attack dog; he was a
member of the Biden administration’s medical advisory board on COVID. He
was asked: Is it possible that this cancer developed suddenly and progressed
rapidly to stage 4?
It is not, Emanuel said. Biden surely has “had this for
many years, maybe even a decade, growing there and spreading,” he told
host Joe Scarborough. “He probably had it at the start of his presidency in
2021.” Emanuel described himself as “surprised” that a test for older men
designed to detect prostate-specific antigens in the blood would have
repeatedly failed to detect a cancer as aggressive as Biden’s—unless, for some
reason, the former president had refused the test during all of the years that
his cancer was advancing. Or …
“If he took it and didn’t report it and it was elevated,
that is another case of doctors not being straightforward with us,” Ezekiel
concluded. “We’ve had several of them with President Trump, especially around
his COVID diagnosis. And if that is true, that would be very troubling.”
Republicans are passing around a video from 2022 on
social media today in which Biden mumbles something
about “why I and so damn many other people I grew up with have cancer.” At the
time, that comment sounded like a standard-issue Sleepy Joe gaffe. In
hindsight, it sounds different. What did the president know, and when did he
know it?
And if he was quietly diagnosed earlier and refused to
share the information, why is he sharing it now? It wouldn’t have anything to
do with trying to distract the public from the new
book exposing his decline in office that’s being published tomorrow, would
it?
“They’re using a more sympathetic, smaller lie to deflect
from the giant, unsympathetic lie they’ve been caught in and trying to make you
feel like you’re not allowed to say anything about it because that would be
mean,” podcaster Mary
Katharine Ham said of members of Team Joe, speculating that they covered up
his cancer too and chose to reveal it now for strategic purposes. “I know this
is the M.O. because it has always been Biden’s M.O. to point to his
(significant) personal tragedies when he’s in hot water, and now his family is
doing it on his behalf.”
If her theory seems uncharitable, well, that’s the point
of the strategy. Having forfeited all right to ask the public to trust their
claims about his mental acuity, the Biden claque might now feel it has no
choice but to try to shame critics into silence. But it’s not going to work: If
Biden were senile and stricken with a deadly disease while president,
covering all of that up with “fit as a fiddle” happy talk would make the giant
lie to which Ham refers that much more gigantic, no?
What on earth are Democrats going to do about all this?
Birds of a feather.
The most arresting line I’ve seen about Jake Tapper and
Alex Thompson’s book on the Biden cover-up came from Tyler Austin Harper in a review
for The Atlantic. “The American people … must confront the
possibility that the book raises,” he wrote, “that we may not have had a
president capable of discharging the office since Barack Obama left the White
House, in 2017.”
Eight years is a long time for a supposedly serious
country to be led by people whose brains don’t work properly. Not only is
American decline a choice, as Charles Krauthammer said, it’s a choice to which
we seem unusually committed.
Democrats dislike comparisons between Biden and Donald
Trump because Trump is a proudly malevolent authoritarian. He doesn’t seek to
expand executive power incrementally, as all modern presidents do, so much as
he rejects limits on his power as unfair per se. He thinks the constitutional
system (or, really, law writ large insofar as it inhibits him) is stupid. He’s
a different kind of beast.
He’s the only president who lost a national election and
then connived, through incitement and chicanery, to try to overturn the result.
But he’s no longer the only president to attempt a coup of sorts for the sake
of remaining in power.
Joe and the Biden mafia were prepared to deny American
voters an informed choice for president last year, until his debate performance
last June made his candidacy untenable. We call it a coup when a duly elected
leader is suddenly replaced by someone whom no one voted for, don’t we? Well,
that’s what Biden’s inner circle aimed to achieve. The insiders offered the
electorate someone whom they swore was fit for office and hoped to deceive them
into handing power to someone who actually was unfit. Had he won, according to
Tapper and Thompson, we’d be governed by a man whose trains of thought began to
derail as
far back as 2017 and who might soon have needed
a wheelchair to get around. And who, as of Sunday afternoon, there’s reason
to believe may have been harboring a secret about stage 4 prostate cancer.
Some MAGA diehards fantasize about an end-around the 22nd
Amendment in 2028 that would see a Vance-Trump ticket elected, at which point
President J.D. would resign and stand aside for the real leader. That’s
basically what Democrats attempted last year: Healthy Joe Biden was on the
ballot but Infirm Joe Biden would have replaced him in office. It wasn’t a
traditional coup attempt of the “bludgeoning cops with flagpoles at the
Capitol” variety, but it was a willful ploy to rig an election by
deliberately misrepresenting the stakes.
And it succeeded. Unlike Trump’s coup attempt, Biden’s
worked—at least until the presidential campaign began in earnest. There’s no
way to know precisely when he went from having “lost a step” to being unable to
perform the duties of his office, but it’s clear now that moment came long
before the June debate. Rather than inform the public of that fact, the Biden
White House let America sail on without a captain. “Five people were running
the country. And Joe Biden was at best a senior member of the board,” one insider
told Tapper and Thompson. Instead of a president, we had a junta.
That’s a coup.
The most one can say to mitigate Democrats’ election-year
conspiracy of silence around Biden is that it was extremely dumb, possibly the
most futile attempted cover-up in American political history. It wasn’t just
unsuccessful, it was actively counterproductive.
After all, many voters had concluded that the
incumbent was too old for another term long before his debate meltdown.
Team Joe pressed on anyway. Some Democrats, like Beto O’Rourke, now accuse
Biden and his aides of “having
failed the country” by foolishly proceeding with a reelection campaign that
appears doomed in hindsight to have ended with a Trump victory. David Plouffe,
Kamala Harris’ campaign manager, told Tapper and Thompson frankly that the
then-president “totally
f—ed us” by remaining in the race so long.
I invite you to imagine what the country would look like
today if Harris had prevailed and the new book exposing Biden’s condition had
dropped during the first months of her presidency. The only reason she won,
Republicans would insist, is because Democrats insisted on sticking for so long
with a nominee who they knew was frail, sickly, and unfit to serve another
term. They deliberately denied voters a chance to vet Harris properly by
keeping her off the ballot as long as possible. They rigged the election—and
she must have been in on it, having spent four years watching Biden up close.
“How can anyone regard her administration as legitimate?”
they would say. What would the answer have been? What would have been left of
the argument that only one of our two modern parties is contemptuous of
American democracy?
The single silver lining for congressional Democrats in
Trump’s victory last fall is that they’ve been spared from having to answer
that question. But they’re going to need to answer some others.
The new January 6?
There are two ways ambitious Democrats will spin the
Biden coup. The first is by showing contrition, aligning themselves with
Americans who are shocked by the revelations.
“It was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the
voters earlier and set up a process that would have gotten us in a position
where we could have been more competitive that fall,” Sen. Chris Murphy of
Connecticut said
Sunday, referring to the pre-debate public anxiety last year about Biden’s
age. “Ultimately, in retrospect, you can’t defend what the Democratic Party did
because we are stuck with a madman, with a corrupt president in the Oval
Office, and we should have given ourselves a better chance to win.”
If that logic sounds familiar, it’s because populist
Republicans reliably pull the same trick when confronted with the latest
indefensible Trump stunt. The stunt is bad not because it’s immoral or
undemocratic, you see, but because the public’s reaction to it will hurt the
party at the polls. Murphy can’t condemn the Biden coup on civic grounds without
antagonizing liberals who defended the president’s fitness last year, so
instead he’s making common cause with them by reframing it as an electoral
strategy. Covering up Biden’s infirmity was bad because it helped Trump.
Poor polling, not poor health, is the chief problem with the Biden team’s
scheme.
The other way to spin the coup comes from Noah
Berlatsky at Public Notice. “Democratic voters want their
representatives to fight; they want them to oppose Trump. They want them to
stop curling into the fetal position whenever the media scolds them,” he wrote,
chastising officials like Murphy who have resorted to self-flagellation. “We
don’t need endless mea culpas. We need a commitment to fight—and a commitment
to hold fascists accountable for their assault on the Constitution.”
His reasoning, replete with manic exhortations to
“fight,” will also feel … familiar to connoisseurs of MAGA media. If you’re
fragging your own general, you’ve lost sight of who the real enemy is. This
is why Democratic politicians will be reluctant to go full “Sister Souljah” on
Biden despite the fact that he’s retired from politics and commands nothing
like the degree of loyalty that the head of the GOP commands on the right. It’s
not a matter of being afraid to criticize Biden, it’s a matter of not wanting
to be seen as helping Trump by changing the subject from whatever his newest
outrage happens to be.
Most Democrats will presumably settle on a combination of
the two approaches. “Joe Biden shouldn’t have run again, and we shouldn’t have
nominated him, but forgive me for being less concerned with that than with
Donald Trump trying to make himself king” will become the standard response to
questions about the former president. It should work fine for the average
blue-state governor or blue-district congressman, who can semi-plausibly claim
that they didn’t interact much with Biden and were as fooled as anyone by his
handlers’ stagecraft.
But what about Harris? Or Cabinet members like Pete
Buttigieg? Or up-and-comers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who absurdly
went on arguing
that Biden remained the least bad option as the party’s nominee even after the
debate last summer? Considering how guests at fundraisers were able to detect
the president’s decline from their seats in the audience, it’s easier to
believe that those who saw him regularly face-to-face were knowing
co-conspirators in the cover-up than that they simply missed the evidence in
front of them. Will grassroots Democrats hold it against them?
Well, have grassroots Republicans held January 6 against
their own leaders?
Those on the right don’t seem to care a bit that some of
their representatives in government abetted a coup plot. Insofar as they do
care, they regard it as a badge of honor. Multiple Republicans have lost
congressional primaries after condemning Trump’s coup attempt, but I can’t
think of one who was ousted for enabling it. Feeling appalled by the riot at
the Capitol has become a litmus test on the right for how leftist one’s
political sympathies are, in fact, egged on by Trump and the White House. Just
today, word came that the family of the insurrectionist who was shot to death
by police while trying to breach the House chamber on January 6 was set to get nearly
$5 million from Trump’s Justice Department to settle a wrongful death
lawsuit.
I doubt we’re going to see the left react the same way to
their own side’s coup plot.
No Democrat will be primaried for failing to blow the
whistle sooner on Sleepy Joe, I suspect, but I also doubt that anyone will be
primaried for harshly condemning Bidenworld’s cover-up now. Unlike Trump,
Kamala Harris’ participation in a coup attempt will not be an advantage
for her in the next presidential primary. (On the contrary, her opponents will
redirect any awkward questions about Biden’s unfitness squarely at her.)
Grassroots liberals won’t be read out of the party as closet conservatives
because they believe the former president should have been more candid about
his cognitive decline. And no one will be cashing in on defiant
“BIDEN WAS FINE” merchandise.
But why? Why the difference between the two sides? It
can’t be as simple as “the right is a movement of depraved cultists and the
left is not.”
Two coups.
I don’t think it is. The great advantage of the Trump
coup over the Biden coup was the relative unfalsifiability of the claims.
To believe Trump, you could take his word for it that
ballots had been thrown out here and voting machines had been tampered with
there and Democratic “mules” were caught on camera messing with drop boxes and
yadda yadda yadda. The supposed conspiracy was vast and complex, beyond voters’
capacity to disprove firsthand. Having a president whom you admired assure you
that sophisticated fraud was afoot was enough to make it plausible, at least if
you really wanted it to be.
The Biden coup lacked that advantage. His aides said he
was fine; voters who’d spent three years watching him with their own eyes
said he wasn’t. Even hardened Biden defenders surely had moments during his
term when they stumbled across video of him looking vacant and found themselves
wondering. How mad can a Democratic voter be at any politician for daring to
acknowledge now that, on second thought, he didn’t look great? Will half the
country plausibly be persuaded that all was well with him if only the party
asserts it aggressively enough, as Trump managed to do with respect to January
6?
There’s also a difference in the two sides’ respective
political investments. Democrats don’t need to go on defending Biden because
his political career is over; there’s nothing to be gained for them by
continuing to insist that he got a raw deal. Trump, on the other hand, never
truly lost control of the GOP after January 6. Rehabilitating the insurrection
was a matter of rehabilitating his political career for those who hoped that
he’d one day return to power. Wayward right-wingers like Liz Cheney had to be
primaried to reinforce the notion that opposing Trump was, and would remain,
tantamount to opposing the party. There’s no need for that on the left with
respect to Biden.
Rather than punish him, my guess is that the closest
thing Democrats have to a Liz Cheney—Dean
Phillips—will be treated by liberals with a modicum of strange (and
grudging) new respect from now on.
But yes, certainly, Republican cultism also helps explain
the difference in the two sides’ behavior. Of course a party that’s
abandoned all pretense of civic virtue to empower an authoritarian sociopath
will cut him more of a break on a coup plot than a party that’s corrupt within
more traditional parameters. Democrats might not end up punishing anyone for
participating in the Biden cover-up, but I doubt that they’ll reward anyone for
it either. Especially Harris: After all this, she seems to me less likely to
become the nominee in 2028 (which was already unlikely) than she was a week
ago.
The dull but probably correct answer is that the Biden
coup won’t matter much long-term because Americans’ political attention spans
have been completely shot by ubiquitous fast-moving digital media and endless
Trumpy political shiny objects. It’ll probably end up as a pro forma GOP
talking point whenever the insurrection is brought up—whatabout the Biden
cover-up?—but, because it failed in the end, otherwise not a particularly
galvanizing one.
Unless, that is, Democrats nominate another
older-than-time candidate in 2028 like Bernie Sanders. Given their terrible
political instincts, that can’t be worse than a 50-50 proposition.
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