I'm sorry Biden has cancer. But lies about his health make the timing suspicious. | Opinion
America would now face an unprecedented political crisis if former President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats had been successful last year with their lies about his health.
Let me start by sending my sincere sympathy to former President Joe Biden and his family about his cancer diagnosis. I hope he’s able to receive effective treatment.
The announcement that Biden, 82, has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones came May 18. He purportedly was diagnosed May 16.
Biden himself addressed the bad news May 19 in a post on X: “Cancer touches us all. Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places."
Yet, this news – and its timing – makes me wonder if the Biden family is trying to manipulate me and the rest of the country. After all, that’s what they did for the last years of Biden’s presidency.
A much-awaited book documenting Biden’s decline while president and its cover-up by those closest to him is set to be released May 20. In recent weeks, the book “Original Sin” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, has garnered a steady drumbeat of negative headlines for Biden.
So, that makes the timing of the announcement about his diagnosis a convenient way to change the conversation and to paint Biden and his family in a much more sympathetic light.
After all, who wants to rip someone when they’re already down?
We already were lied to about Biden's health. That makes it hard to believe what we're told now.
I’m still angry, however, about what Biden, his family, his closest aides and the Democratic Party as a whole tried to pull last year.
Biden’s mental and physical decline was obvious over the years of his presidency, but those closest to him tried to tell voters that he was totally fine and capable of running the country, not only then but for years to come.
It was a blatant lie, and they knew it. The truth, which I and other conservative observers had called out multiple times in early 2024 and even before then, became impossible to ignore after Biden’s late-June debate with then-candidate Donald Trump.
Even then, however, Biden’s wife, Jill Biden, had the audacity to claim that he was fine – it was just one bad night.
Shamefully, the Biden family broke our trust by refusing to be truthful about what was going on in front of our eyes.
So, again, while I'm sorry about the ordeal that Biden and his family now face, I have no confidence that the timing of this announcement wasn’t a strategic move to soften the blow of the new “Original Sin” book.
If Biden had won another term, we'd now be faced with President Kamala Harris
Biden’s cancer also brings to mind what could have happened if he and his enablers had succeeded in what they attempted to do – win a second term by hiding the truth about his mental and physical decline from voters.
Only six months after the election, the country would have encountered a political crisis of unprecedented scale. Given Biden's diagnosis, it's likely that he would have been unable to continue as commander in chief.
So, there’s not much doubt that we’d now face a President Kamala Harris for the remainder of Biden's second term.
The sense of betrayal among voters who believed, with cause, that the election was stolen through lies and manipulation − and the subsequent fallout − would have been overwhelming.
After seeing Harris in action on the campaign trail, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that we’re not in that situation. Yet, that is what the Biden machine tried to pull off.
It’s unforgivable. And while the cancer diagnosis is undeniably sad, Biden, his family and his advisers won’t be able to escape the shame that’s sure to follow these new revelations.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at Paste BN. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques