Emergency All-Medical Edition

Joe Biden, long known to be unwell by nearly everyone in America except the mainstream media and professional Democrats, has now been revealed to be far more unwell than we even suspected: His communications team announced on Sunday night that Biden has been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, which has metastasized to the bone. It is a terrible situation for the former president, and my first thought upon hearing the news was to pray for him and his family.

My second thought was less charitable, however, and it had that old Howard Baker ring to it: “What did the president know and when did he know it?” (This was also my third, fourth, and fifth thought.) My answer: far more than they are admitting with this “modified limited hangout” strategy. Biden and his people are likely hoping that America will react to the news of his cancer diagnosis with pity and generosity and drop all those awkward questions about whether his entire presidency was a giant fraud executed by a cabal of presidential aides. Democratic operative David Axelrod accidentally read the stage directions out loud Sunday night when he went on CNN: “Those conversations will happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.” (Points for subtlety there, Dave.)

I will not drop those questions. I will not be gulled by a cheap and cynical strategy. Readers, set aside for a moment the natural (and proper) instinct to empathize with a cancer diagnosis, and realize: Joe Biden and his team are still lying to you.

Few would outright trust that Biden’s doctors only just now discovered his cancer, and I’m pleased to note that for once the mainstream media is out in force saying so. Dr. Zeke Emanuel (Rahm’s brother and one of the most accomplished oncologists in the United States) went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and bluntly said that Biden had to have been suffering from prostate cancer for years: “He did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021.” Both Emanuel and Scarborough were in fact unusually emphatic that this was not speculation, and that it was a medical impossibility for Biden’s cancer to be new. (For those who remember fading Biden administration lore, Morning Joe was famous as Biden’s “favorite television show,” the only one he watched most mornings — and the hosts of Morning Joe are well aware of this.)

Left unstated, but implied, by Emanuel and Scarborough is that Biden was well aware of the fact that he had cancer. This particular cancer is not the sort that emerges at stage 4 as a surprise, not to mention in one of the most carefully medically monitored human beings on earth. (It would be plausible, perhaps, for an older man who hated going to the doctor to show up at his local hospital after 15 years without a checkup to receive such a diagnosis, but such things do not sneak up on the president of the United States.) In fact, many are now wondering whether Biden, in a typical “Biden moment,” accidentally revealed his condition to the world back in 2022 — and we all figured he was garbling his words rather than inadvertently pulling back the curtain.

So, has Biden been receiving cancer treatment for years and concealing it? This would explain one of the aspects of Biden’s presidency most frequently mocked by his opponents: his seemingly unbreakable schedule of regular weekend travel to his family home in Delaware. It would have been a very dangerous game for the Biden administration to try to falsify official White House visitor logs; Joe Biden’s Delaware abode, meanwhile, has no such legal requirements.

Of course this is pure speculation. But would you bet on the other side of the question? And who wouldn’t speculate this way, given that the Biden administration spent the last four years lying brazenly to us about his parlous mental state? These people do not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Recall that a year ago today, Joe Biden was still running for reelection. We now discover that, even as Biden’s campaign raged about “cheap fakes,” they were contemplating having to put him in a wheelchair if he won. One of Biden’s senior aides has excused the conspiracy to hide the president’s mental and physical collapse with simon-pure cynicism: “He just had to win, and then he could disappear for four years — he’d only have to show proof of life every once in a while.”

This is a level of corruption worthy of medieval European court politics. (“The king is dying, we must keep it secret to secure the succession!”) It is all the more appalling to see it come from a Democratic Party that has, for the past decade, portrayed itself — alternately smug and shrieking — as the Last Guardians of American Democracy. It is also mildly tragic.

For I well understand the valence of the present political moment: Trust in political institutions has all but vanished, and anyone who focuses on the misdeeds of one side misses the importance of the culture-wide collapse. To wit: Donald Trump is about to accept a free jet as a bribe from Qatar, and to phrase it any more euphemistically than that would be to lie about the true nature of the transaction. (Many will now complain that I pointed out this obvious truth about the collapse of public trust in a piece about Biden, thus missing the point.)

And yet a grand fraud was perpetrated upon the American people over the last half decade — and, evidently, we only knew half of it. We are only just beginning to realize the full scale of the imposture and to reckon with its consequences. They will be more extensive than many realize. Trust has now been permanently broken on all sides. And the only reason to trust any official statement from the former president about his health now is that you think the Biden administration showed candor in its previous dealings with the public in regard to the president’s health.