Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses Biden's late withdrawal from the 2024 race.
And in years gone by, that would have been it. A bipartisan show of support for a former president of the United States upon their diagnosis with what would appear to be incurable cancer.
But this is 2025. So, no, it didn’t go like that.
MAGA-adjacent social media is lit this morning with accusations that this announcement is suspicious, on two grounds. And you can hardly ignore just the noise, given all we’ve learned this past week.
First is the extraordinary timing, coming with Biden at the center of a firestorm of accusations that he was losing his mental faculties while in office and that his closest aides covered it up. The book helping shape those allegations, “Original Sin” by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper, is literally out tomorrow. The conversation around those claims will inevitably feel different now.
Just check out this quote from David Axelrod, the former Obama aide and frequent Biden critic, who told CNN any discussion about the former president’s mental acuity “should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this.” You can imagine how that’s going down on the right.
Second, and more significantly, there are accusations spreading like wildfire — including from Trump’s son, Don Jr. — that aspects of this tragic diagnosis stretch back further than last week, and that Biden’s cancer was kept quiet while he was in office. Certainly, plenty of doctors say it would be unusual — though far from impossible — for prostate cancer this serious to suddenly emerge out of the blue. Far-right activist Laura Loomer’s claims from back in July 2024 that Biden had a terminal illness are now being reamplified by his critics. Pro-MAGA X users are also reupping Biden’s statement to camera in 2022, when he bluntly said he had cancer, which aides insisted at the time was a misunderstanding.
None of which proves anything. Publicly available facts are sparse, and plenty of people are outraged this is even being discussed at such a sensitive time. But it does matter.
Given the already intense scrutiny of Biden’s mental and physical state — and that he insisted he was in good health while trying to secure another four-year term as president with his party’s fulsome support — these accusations are not going away quietly.
