Biden’s Decline and the Democratic Fallout

Those excerpts offered a behind-the-scenes look at Democratic efforts to shield a physically feeble Biden, who forgot longtime acquaintances and appeared “catatonic” at fundraisers, from public view. And on Friday, Axios released the full audio of Biden’s October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur, confirming the frequent memory lapses, pauses, and confusion that Hur referenced in his 2024 report on the then-president’s handling of classified documents. The rapid succession of stories about Biden’s health not only cast doubt on his ability to execute the duties of the presidency but also raised serious questions about the White House’s transparency about the former president’s diminishing health. 

As concerns mounted last week, a Biden spokesperson announced Tuesday—the same day a roughly 5,000-word excerpt from Original Sin ran in The New Yorker—that doctors had found a small nodule on the former president’s prostate during a routine physical. By Sunday, Biden’s personal office shared the more sobering news: Biden had been diagnosed with a form of Stage 4 prostate cancer that had already spread to his bones. It received a Gleason Score of 9 out of 10, indicating a high likelihood that the cancer will advance and metastasize further. 

According to his office, Biden and his family are reviewing treatment options for the cancer, which “appears to be hormone-sensitive,” allowing for “effective management.” Most prostate cancers progress slowly, allowing them to generally be caught early and treated. The five-year survival rate is 97 percent, but after the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, that rate drops to 37 percent. 

Biden’s seemingly late diagnosis has raised concerns about how long the cancer went either undetected or unannounced. “Very few people get diagnosed this advanced,” Dr. Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist and former member of Biden’s COVID-19 advisory board, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “He’s had this for many years, maybe even a decade.” 

But there may be standard medical explanations for the late diagnosis. A Biden spokesperson said Tuesday that the former president had not undergone a protein-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer since 2014. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommended in 2018 that PSA testing not be conducted after age 70, given that some men would be treated for cancer that would have never caused symptoms in their lifetimes. Democrats have pointed to this possibility: “There is a fair amount of literature indicating that older men should not be tested,” Rep. Ron Wyden told TMD. “So I just urge people to not jump to any conclusions.” 

But some medical experts have expressed concerns that a sitting president would not have received more thorough exams. “It is true that a lot of people recommend not doing a prostate-specific antigen after 70, but President Biden has been in public life a very long time. He was vice president and had a lot of exams under 70. So it’s a little surprising that they didn’t do it, and maybe President Biden decided he didn’t want the test,” Emanuel said. Dr. Chris George, medical director of the cancer program at Northwestern Health Network, told Reuters that it was “hard” to believe that Biden’s blood tests in the last year had been normal. 

The scrutiny around the cancer diagnosis coincided with revelations in Original Sin about the cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline. The titular “sin”—a phrase Democratic insiders themselves coined—refers to Biden’s decision to run for reelection in 2024, a choice that surprised many in the party and sparked efforts by Biden’s inner circle to hide his troubling mental state. “Most of us didn’t think he was going to run again,” Jeffrey Forbes, a Democratic lobbyist, told TMD. “No one could believe it at first. I was like, ‘We’re dead. We’re going to get demolished.’”

The anecdotes in Original Sin are startling. In one, Biden failed to recognize George Clooney at a 2024 fundraising event, despite knowing the actor for decades. After Biden’s disastrous presidential debate against Donald Trump in June later that year, when Clooney subsequently decided to pen his op-ed in the New York Times calling for Biden to drop out of the race, Democratic operatives close to the president tried to shut down the piece. “Democrats deceived the country about Biden’s abilities and, Clooney said, ‘that’s how Trump won,’” Tapper and Thompson wrote. 

And the deception was blatant, as own Steve Hayes wrote in a review of the book on the site today:

Top Biden advisers insisted to reporters that the president was fine—as sharp as ever, in command of facts, energetic in meetings, perfectly capable not only of running for reelection but serving another four years. The public gaffes were anomalous, they insisted, indicative of nothing more than the occasional brain fart, and we all have those, right? His literal missteps? Okay, he’s getting a little older and he has arthritis in his feet, they would concede, but none of this has any effect on his ability to do the job. If a reporter was imprudent enough to ask about Biden’s increasing number of blunders, they’d be quietly threatened with revoked access to White House sources and sometimes attacked in public.

Elsewhere in Original Sin, the authors covered deliberations among top aides—who publicly rebuffed concerns about the president’s deteriorating health—on whether Biden would need a wheelchair if reelected. “We were repeatedly lied to by people in the White House who were always saying, ‘He’s fine, he’s fine, he’s fine,’” Tapper said in a Tuesday interview with CBS. 

The campaign even recruited legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg to minimize Biden’s struggles in videos. The Jurassic Park director brought in different lighting and special microphones for the president, while staffers used slow-motion videos of Biden to hide how slowly he walked. Tapper and Thompson report that first lady Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, and an inner circle nicknamed “the Politburo,” including senior advisers Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti, circled the wagon to protect Biden. According to the book, those close to the former president convinced themselves that he was the right person to beat Trump—after all, he had done it once before. 

Biden, for his part, still seems to think he could have prevented Trump’s ascendency. In an interview with The View in early May, he said he “wasn’t surprised” that former Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election, saying sexist and racist attacks prevented her from winning. But he doesn’t believe his delayed decision to drop out of the running doomed her odds. Speaking to BBC this month, Biden said he didn’t think leaving the race earlier “would have mattered.” 

But many in the Democratic Party, particularly those close to Harris, see Biden’s decision to run again as the reason Trump is now in office. “It’s all Biden,” David Plouffe, who worked on Harris’ campaign, told Tapper and Thompson. “He totally f—ked us.” 

Other Democrats are beginning to come to similar conclusions. When asked about whether the Democratic Party would have been better off without Biden as the nominee, Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said, “Maybe, you know, right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that is the case.”

Rep. Ro Khanna was even more straightforward in an interview with ABC last week: “It’s painfully obvious President Biden should not have run,” he said. And elected officials aren’t the only ones speaking out. Democratic strategists are also disavowing Biden, with Jon Favreau, a former Obama speechwriter and host of the podcast Pod Save America, saying that “every Democratic politician” needs to “rip the f—ing Band-Aid off” and admit that Biden should not have run. 

“I think everyone is like, ‘We all f—king knew, and we all got rolled.’ It was the power of the people around him that rolled us,” a Democratic operative told TMD. “With no data at all—they convinced themselves that he was the only one who could beat Trump.”

But more than just regretting choosing Biden as their nominee, some Democrats seem to be tacitly acknowledging their silence around Biden’s declining mental acuity in light of the book and Hur audio. When asked whether Biden had suffered cognitive decline, Sen. Chris Murphy told Politico, “There’s no doubt about it”—despite standing by Biden after his poor debate performance in 2024. Other Democrats seem to concur. “I do think that the advisers and people close to Joe Biden owe an explanation,” Khanna said, citing the “Zoom calls” in which Biden staffers promised the former president was capable. “I do, again, believe that some of us should have pushed back more,” Khanna added. Tommy Vietor, a co-host of Pod Save America and a former Obama spokesman, admitted on X that his and others’ attacks on Hur “weren’t totally fair.” 

It isn’t yet clear what long-term effects Democrats’ efforts to distance themselves from Biden might have on the party. “I think the scrutiny of the candidates in ‘28 is where you’ll see the fallout,” Forbes said. “I don’t know that there’s an electoral fallout, I don’t know that there’s a fallout with leadership. … But I do think that the scrutiny of the backgrounds of the candidates in ‘28 is going to be a big piece of it.”

For governors with their eyes on 2028, explanations for the revelations about the former president’s health varied. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker denied ever seeing cognitive decline in Biden, while Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has avoided discussing the topic altogether. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, on the other hand, said that he raised concerns with Biden privately after the debate. Time will tell whether accusations of a cover-up will sink Democratic candidates. “If that’s the case,” the Democratic operative said, “then we have no one that can run.”

In the meantime, some Democrats have turned to deflection. When asked whether Democrats should have been more open about Biden’s age in 2024, Sen. John Hickenlooper declined to answer, citing Biden’s cancer diagnosis. “There’s no point in asking that question,” he told TMD. “You’re going too far.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries toed a similar line on Monday when questioned by our own Charles Hilu, criticizing Republicans for “peddling conspiracy theories” as Biden faces a health crisis. 

Forbes, the Democratic lobbyist, suggests that party leaders and officials might be singing a different tune privately. “I think they feel like dog s—t because they kept it quiet when they felt that way last year,” he said. “People knew, everyone just couldn’t say it. Also, you get to a point where, ‘If I say it, is it worth it? What do I get from that?’”

• Some people view the proliferation of artificial intelligence as a doomsday event for education. But in Miami, the nation’s third-largest public school district, educators are embracing the new technology, Natasha Singer reported for the New York Times. “Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school district, is at the forefront of a fast-moving national experiment to embed generative A.I. technologies into teaching and learning. Over the last year, the district has trained more than 1,000 educators on new AI tools and is now introducing Google chatbots for more than 105,000 high schoolers — the largest U.S. school district deployment of its kind to date. It is a sharp turnabout from two years ago, when districts like Miami blocked A.I. chatbots over fears of mass cheating and misinformation,” she wrote. “If the classroom A.I. crusade succeeds, it could remake teaching and learning, in part by casting chatbots as the intermediaries that students turn to first for tutoring and feedback—before teachers see their work. The A.I. gambit could also end up eroding important skills like critical thinking, researchers say, or lead students to over-rely on chatbots.”

The New York Times: Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People

Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, bungled answers on Tuesday about habeas corpus, incorrectly asserting that the legal right of people to challenge their detention by the government was actually the president’s “constitutional right” to deport people.

…

At a Senate hearing, Senator Maggie Hassan, [a] Democrat of New Hampshire, asked Ms. Noem about the issue. “Secretary Noem,” she asked, “what is habeas corpus?”

“Well,” Ms. Noem said, “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to—”

“No,” Ms. Hassan interjected. “Let me stop you, ma’am. Excuse me, that’s incorrect.”

Politico: Musk to Step Back From Political Spending: ‘I Think I’ve Done Enough.’

George Wendt, the award-winning actor best known for playing Norm Peterson on Cheers, died Tuesday at the age of 73. Here’s a compilation of every time he entered the Bull & Finch Pub. NOOORM!!

Do you think Democrats’ delayed reckoning with Biden’s apparent decline could have consequences at the ballot box?