Here we are, years from June 2024, when then-President Joe Biden fell flat on his face in his sole debate against then-former President Donald Trump. And the excuses from Biden’s family continue.
The Biden family has a new explanation for the night that ended Joe Biden’s presidency. Hunter went on a podcast to reveal that his father was suffering from stage IV prostate cancer — undiagnosed, unknown to the family — during the June 2024 debate that exposed what conservatives had been saying for years: the President of the United States was not capable of doing his job.
Hunter’s exact words: “My dad had cancer. My dad, he was, and he didn’t know. I mean, we didn’t find out until nine months later that he not only had Stage 4 prostate cancer, but he had Stage 4 metastatic bone cancer, which means that it had been metastasizing for over a three-year period of time.”
Groan. But okay. Let’s take Hunter at his word for the purposes of this argument. Joe Biden had been suffering from metastatic bone cancer for over three years before his diagnosis. That means he was carrying a serious, progressive illness through the final years of his presidency — through the Afghanistan withdrawal, through the Ukraine war, through the inflation crisis, through every major decision his administration made. And nobody knew. Or if somebody knew, nobody told the American people.
This is the same family that spent four years insisting Joe Biden was sharp, capable, and absolutely fine. The same handlers who carefully stage-managed every press appearance, limited unscripted interactions, and dismissed any journalist who asked about the president’s obvious cognitive decline as a right-wing conspiracy theorist. The same White House physician who gave Biden a clean bill of health in press releases while — if Hunter’s timeline is accurate — the president was carrying metastatic cancer that had been spreading for three years.
The debate didn’t lie. The presidency was the lie.
What the debate did was force millions of Americans who had been told to ignore their own eyes to finally see what was right in front of them. A man stood at a podium, his mouth fell open, his eyes went blank, and his train of thought simply disappeared. Jill Biden reportedly wondered if he had been drugged. His own family was apparently so unprepared for what they witnessed that they reached for conspiracy before accepting the obvious.
He wasn’t drugged. He was sick. And he had been sick — apparently — for years.
The cancer diagnosis explains the debate performance in Hunter’s telling. What it doesn’t explain — what nothing the Biden family has said or will say can explain — is why this man was allowed to run for president, why his decline was concealed from the American people for years, and why the Democratic Party and its media allies invested so heavily in maintaining a fiction that collapsed the moment Joe Biden stood at a podium for 90 minutes.
Hunter is sorry his father is ill. So is everyone. Joe Biden deserves compassion as a human being fighting a serious disease.
What he and his family and their allies do not deserve is a pass on what they did to this country by hiding it.
