Adding to the controversy over Joe Biden’s mental and physical condition–not now, but during the time when he purported to be president–is the revelation that he suffers from an advanced form of prostate cancer. The cancer, now metastasizing, must have been with Biden for a long time, almost certainly since before he became president in 2021. But his staff claims that it has only now been discovered.
I expressed skepticism about that assertion here. Today, Biden’s team pushed back against such doubts:
Former President Joe Biden last underwent a Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) blood test, one of the most common ways to screen for prostate cancer, in 2014 while he was serving as Barack Obama’s vice president, a spokesperson for his office announced Tuesday.
“Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer,” the rep went on in response to speculation that the 82-year-old had been secretly diagnosed while in office.
A Biden aide suggested that Biden and his friend/physician Kevin O’Connor at some point deliberately stopped doing PSA tests, which are totally routine for any man over 50–let alone a president!
“I think the likely scenario, knowing Kevin O’Connor pretty well, is that they had a discussion on what a PSA test is, and they decided not to do one because it would likely be elevated and cause a story, since a lot of older men have high PSAs that are false positives,” a long-serving aide to Biden told The Post Monday.
“A blood test has a paper trail. They probably just didn’t do the test. I think it would leak if he had a PSA test they tried to bury.”
There is a reason why presidents and presidential candidates normally release reports on their physical examinations. Voters have a legitimate interest in the health of their chief executive, an interest that, most believe, outweighs the politician’s entirely legitimate privacy concerns. Here, the suggestion is that Biden deliberately refrained from getting PSA tests after he entered the presidential picture lest a “false positive” be leaked to the press.
I think we can tweak that hypothesis just a little, and probably arrive at the truth. I suspect that Biden had PSA tests after 2014 that are not in the public domain, but that indicated an increasingly aggressive prostate cancer. Biden’s team then decided against including PSA tests in the official physical examinations he was given as a candidate and as president, not out of fear of a false positive that would give voters the wrong impression, but rather out of fear that an accurate test report would reveal to voters one aspect of Biden’s deteriorating condition.
Putting aside 2020, when Biden and his doctors most likely knew about his prostate cancer, if voters had known in 2024 that he suffered from an aggressive, metastasizing cancer it surely would have doomed his prospects for re-election. So Biden and his team hid his condition, even though they knew that, should Biden win the election, his cancer would probably make it impossible for him to finish a second four-year term.
We don’t know for sure that this scenario is correct, but it is the most likely explanation for the seemingly inexplicable behavior of Joe Biden and his closest advisers. One might ask: why would Biden and the Democrats go to such extremities to preserve his viability as a presidential candidate? The answer, of course, is that they thought it was necessary to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president. That is, at this point, the only raison d’être of the Democratic Party.
