Jill Biden has questions to answer – her husband was never fit to run for a second term

Just after Joe Biden put out a statement announcing that he had prostate cancer that had metastasised to his bones, political leaders from around the world offered their support – from Donald Trump to Barack Obama, and many others.

But the president’s son, Donald Jr, chose a different route. He posted on X (Twitter) almost immediately: “What I want to know is how did Dr Jill Biden miss stage five [sic] metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up?”

When I saw this post, I was revolted by it. Jill Biden isn’t a medical doctor – she has a doctorate in education. And for God’s sake, man, do you have no humanity? An old guy has just revealed some pretty dire medical news – do you immediately have to go into full Watergate mode?

It’s offensive on so many levels, but the more I reflected on it, the more I thought this response was in some ways understandable.

First, the diagnosis. I am not any kind of doctor – OK, I have an honorary doctorate from my old university – so I am not going to offer commentary on medicine. But from what I have read, it feels unusual that someone can present with such an advanced stage of cancer having had no symptoms before.

Furthermore, Joe Biden isn’t someone living in poverty in a trailer park in the boondocks with no insurance and limited access to healthcare. Until January this year, his home was the east wing of the White House. It has a fully staffed medical centre, with 24/7 care. If he needed more assistance, there was a helicopter at his disposal to take him a few miles north to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda – that is where Donald Trump went when his respiratory condition worsened during Covid.

Even when he flies on Air Force One, there is a fully equipped medical area, and a physician and nurse are always on board. So, the suggestion that he might not have had a PSA test (the test that looks for prostate cancer) for years strikes me as scarcely credible. At my NHS GP surgery, I have an annual blood test to look at that, although I also acknowledge they can sometimes deliver unreliable results.

But it is the timing of the announcement that is most curious. Of course, it is entirely possible that we should take everything at face value – that the former president went to see his doctor at the end of last week with a urinary problem, and that’s when he received the diagnosis.

But this announcement came just a day before the publication of Original Sin, a book co-authored by the distinguished CNN anchor Jake Tapper, which examines the extent to which the Biden White House covered up the true state of the 82-year-old’s health. In it, it is claimed that Biden had significant spinal arthritis, and that the people who had been saying “He’s fine” throughout the election were afterwards much more willing to finally admit the truth.

To put it bluntly: was Team Biden trying to garner sympathy for their man ahead of Tapper’s exposé, which purports to show that the president wasn’t exactly playing with a full deck of cards while he was in the White House and while he was still intending to run for a second term?

Just over a year ago, I was in Washington and was at a fancy dinner with very senior journalists and Democrats who knew Biden well. There was a round-table discussion about the forthcoming election, which was still several months away. I asked the assembled guests whether they thought Biden would still run, given his apparent cognitive decline. They all confidently said he would definitely run and that he was OK healthwise.

But we now know from the Tapper book he was anything but. And let’s be frank about this – what the book reveals is pretty much what the American people had long suspected, and was proven in hideous technicolour when Biden fell apart in the televised CNN debate.

In 2021, I flew back from Washington to go to the G7 summit at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. In the secure area, the hotel had a pub-style bar, with benches outside overlooking the sea. I was having a drink with our then ambassador, Karen Pierce, when to our astonishment Joe and Jill Biden started walking towards us. They sat at the next table. It seemed barely a word passed between them. He sat there just staring out into the middle distance. And then, as though acting as his carer, Jill said, “Come on Joe, time to go.” And off they went – her walking, him shuffling – a phalanx of security guards in tow.

At the time, I thought it was maybe jetlag. It might well have been. But the more I think about it, the more I can only conclude that those in his tightest inner circle were doing their utmost to shield him from scrutiny.

Of course, the reason you have a coterie in politics is to offer some kind of protection from those who want to attack you. But the Biden inner circle morphed into something different. It was misleading and hoodwinking the American public about his true physical and mental condition. It was also aggressively going after any journalist who dared to suggest otherwise.

Let’s go back for a minute to the catastrophic Trump/Biden TV debate. Do you remember afterwards the way Jill heaped praise on her husband, telling him he’d answered every question and that he’d knocked it out of the park? It was disingenuous to the point of ludicrous. So, yes, Jill Biden has questions to answer. Her husband was never fit to run for a second term.

The reason that medical reports on the state of the president’s health are made public is so that there is no lying to the American people – as has happened so often in the past. When Woodrow Wilson, America’s 28th president, fell ill, his doctor said it was exhaustion. He’d in fact suffered a serious stroke that had left him paralysed.

Franklin D Roosevelt projected an image of strength and decisiveness. His contracting polio was hidden, and the Secret Service were tasked with making sure he was never photographed in his wheelchair. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, and was told by his cardiologist in 1955 not to run again – advice he ignored. And John F Kennedy was so full of drugs – painkillers, anti-anxiety medication, and other treatments to combat a life-threatening hormonal condition, back problems and intestinal trouble – that if you had shaken him, he would have rattled.

All of this was kept hidden from voters. It looks increasingly like Joe Biden is a throwback to times that were meant to have long passed.

The 46th president did a lot of good things – in legislation that was enacted, in turning around the post-Covid economy, and in the way he responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And absolutely, his cancer diagnosis may be exactly as it seems. But given the repeated lies and cover-ups about the state of his health, as exposed by Tapper – and it pains me to say this – Don Jr may be spot on in crying foul.