As the 46th president fights to overcome a deadly disease, his party continues to reel from scandals surrounding his presidency.
The health of Joe Biden has long been an issue, though concerns about his condition have often centered around his cognitive rather than physical health. Now, the embattled former president will face the challenge of a lifetime following a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer that has metastasized to his bones. His doctors, however, are expressing cautious optimism that his cancer is treatable. Yet it may come to represent the culmination of a classic Greek tragedy, marked by a person whose downfall is due to a combination of personal failings and circumstances beyond his control. Allies and opponents alike will now be praying for the full recovery of the 46th president as his beleaguered party grapples with the latest revelations about the scandal surrounding his presidency.
In an audio recording of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur, obtained by Axios late last week, Biden stumbled pitifully through questions about the classified documents he held in four locations, including his garage, after his term as vice president had ended in 2017. The transcript of that meeting had been released in 2023, when Hur declined to indict Biden because he was “an elderly man with a poor memory” who would likely elicit sympathy from a jury. But hearing it was even more disturbing than reading it, and it served to dredge up the whole scandal once more.
Biden’s longtime defenders, who attacked Hur’s conclusion, cannot deny what is on the recording, nor the gory ex post facto details of Biden’s descent, revealed in the latest book set to be released tomorrow, May 20. Authored by CNN’s Jake Tapper, the book is titled Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again. In an evident attempt to exorcise his demons, Tapper, among many others in legacy media, pretends to be shocked, shocked, by insider accounts of Biden’s decline months after the 2024 election. Still, party regulars continue their efforts to sweep the scandal under the rug.
Even the likes of far-left platform The Nation are now vilifying Biden and his inner circle, headlining a story titled “The Biden Scandal Goes Well Beyond the Aging Cover-Up,” and calling Biden a narcissist. The story goes on to observe that the situation “calls for at least some self-reflection. When dealing with a collective entity such as a political party, the minimum demand should be a thoroughgoing autopsy … Yet, for a variety of reasons, Democrats have largely avoided even cursory introspection.”
Refusing to Come Clean
How will the Democratic Party regain its bygone credibility when it refuses to come clean about an administration in which the president was visibly incapacitated while it continued to prevaricate about what was obvious to anyone paying even scant attention? There are only so many times that Biden’s closest advisors – National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was the latest – can argue that they never witnessed the same behavior privately that the rest of the country saw publicly. Saying “it may be true, but I never saw it” strains credulity to the breaking point.
Sullivan even denies the revelation in the Tapper book that Biden forgot Sullivan’s name multiple times. The former president is also reported to have forgotten George Clooney’s name – evidently believing that, since there is no hard evidence of such, he can simply declare it’s not true and people will somehow believe him. In actuality, his denial of credulous revelations only adds more fuel to the raging fire.
The reason this scandal is not likely to end anytime soon is that several Democratic politicians are loath to reveal just who was running the country up to and beyond the point when Biden ended his re-election campaign but remained in office. In his final months, Biden was freezing up and wandering about aimlessly at public appearances. Now we discover in the latest book that White House aides were blocking members of his own Cabinet from accessing the president. So, who was making decisions and signing documents with the now-infamous auto-pen? Was it Jill Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, or members of Biden’s White House staff, and if so, which ones? Or was it all of the above? We are unlikely to ever get to the truth.
The Biden Scandal in Perspective
Many are now arguing that this is the greatest scandal in American history, greater even than the Watergate Scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. But in fairness, this is not the first time a president’s incapacities were withheld from the American people. Consider the circumstances surrounding Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wilson was stricken with a stroke late in the 7th year of his presidency, but it was never revealed to the public, and his wife, Edith, is said to have called the shots until he vacated the White House in 1921. When he ran for an unprecedented fourth term in 1944, FDR was in grave condition but managed to mask his failing health until his death less than three months after his inauguration.
But Wilson and Roosevelt presided long before the days of the internet and social media. Now, even though the media was incurious, at best, as the sad saga of Joe Biden’s decline unfolded, it is all over the story, backtracking, hoping the public will forgive or forget their refusal to come clean in the heat of an election campaign. It may not recover any of the media’s record-low credibility, but it will certainly continue to be a thorn in the side of a political party skidding into the ditch. There may be some relief for all involved with news of Biden’s cancer diagnosis that will undoubtedly spark sympathy far and wide. But it is likely to serve only as a temporary pause in a scandal that will not go away.
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