Original Sin, an expose of how Joe Biden’s team covered-up his decline, will be published tomorrow, and the book’s damning stories – such as the fact that his aides debated putting him in a wheelchair – have already blown apart the claim that the US president was always mentally sound while in office.
The book has gripped Washington and forced the Democrats to face the reality that their presidential nominee was not fit to do the job. The revelations provided the cover that Democrats and journalists who did not oppose the president needed in order to at last condemn Biden’s run. Last week, the California congressman Ro Khanna was one of the first Democrats to come out and say plainly that Biden should not have been the party’s nominee.
Yet that reckoning has now been paused after Biden announced on 18 May that he’d been diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer. The news has already taken some of the momentum out of the party’s pursuit of self-reflection. David Axelrod – a top Obama aide who was one of the first last year to suggest Biden should not run – has called for the criticism to be more “muted and set aside for now as he’s struggling through this”. During a town hall in Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, yesterday, Rep Khanna led a moment of silence in order to pray for the former president.
At a time when the party was finally examining the missteps which led to Biden belatedly standing down, his VP Kamala Harris inheriting the nomination and Trump winning the election, some in the party are now recoiling from that task.
Left too late, those questions will lose their relevance, as the party looks to the mid-terms and 2028. The calls for silence in the name of decorum might only delay the party realising the brutal truth is that this might be further evidence that he was not fit to run for a second term.
Biden’s evident decline means that the news of his illness has not been received as it likely would have for any other former president. There are the usual messages of sympathy, yes, but there is already speculation that the president’s team knew about his condition long before this month. A diagnosis this severe — the cancer has spread to his bones — has led some doctors to suggest Biden’s physician would have seen signs of the disease perhaps while he was still president. Maga figures such as Don Jr have thrown out the idea that Biden’s team even covered up his cancer.
The current administration excels at stoking conspiracy theories. Yet it was the previous administration’s dishonesty about Biden’s decline that has eroded whatever trust there might have once been when it comes to statements about Biden’s condition. This darkens the shadow which the revelations in Original Sin have cast over Biden and his team’s legacy, and at the same time means Democrats might be more reluctant to put some distance between them and the former president.
An honest appraisal of why the party made Biden the nominee – which is necessary to rebuild trust with voters – now demands criticism of an elderly former president who has a deadly disease. It’s an unsavoury task.
[See also: Joe Biden’s tragedy of errors]
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