Joe Biden’s puzzling legacy

The commentariat is awash with experts on prostate cancer. What precipitated this sudden acquisition of specialized medical expertise? Why, the announcement that former president Joe Biden is suffering from stage four of the big PC which, the news reports are gasping, has metastasized to his bones.

Let me pause to join Donald Trump in expressing my best wishes to the former president for “a fast and successful recovery.” Let me also recall how suddenly the world became populated with epidemiologists after the Wuhan flu led Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the entire bureaucratic establishment to discover their inner totalitarian hankerings.

The revelation about Biden’s health is a sort of synecdoche for a much larger universe of pain. For one thing, people whose normal curiosity has not been stunted by too much exposure to the propaganda press wonder how it is possible that Dr. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s personal physician, could have described him, in February 2023, as “a healthy, vigorous 80-year-old who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” The light side of the episode came on the talk shows. Biden did not have a prostate-specific antigen test, one doctor said, because it was “too expensive.” Titters aside, I note for the record that the blood test typically costs between $20 and $80.

By the time Biden became president in 2021, his incapacity was undeniable if still shamefully unacknowledged

The point is that Biden’s cancer diagnosis is not just a personal tragedy. It is a reminder that this curiously inept political pawn has always functioned to provide cover for political forces he neither originated nor fully understood. Biden became a senator in 1973, more than 50 years ago. He has been pro-immigration and anti-immigration, hard on crime and soft on crime, pro-gay rights and anti-gay rights. Whichever way the winds of party politics were blowing, Biden was there to puff along. Such pliability is a prime secret of his political longevity.

Indeed, an uncharitable observer might say that Biden’s main role as a politician has been to be a muttering orifice obediently parroting the party’s line.

Biden first intruded upon the national consciousness in 1987. That was when he made his inaugural run for the presidency:  a campaign that ended in shambles after he was discovered to have plagiarized from the British politician Neil Kinnock. It was also the year that, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden presided over and helped scuttle the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Senator Ted Kennedy may have been the more memorable anti-Bork barker. But Biden’s nasty and aggressive tactics in that hearing earned him the moniker “the father of Borking.” Supreme Court hearings, once generally almost pro forma events, never recovered. By the time Biden became Barack Obama’s vice-president, his status as a compliant, if irritable, mannequin was confirmed by his increasingly obvious physical and mental debility. By the time he became president, in January 2021, his incapacity was undeniable if often – shamefully – unacknowledged.

The media and his staff made heroic – well, concerted – efforts to deflect the world’s attention. Eventually, though, the charade became unsustainable. Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump at the end of June last year was the final straw. Within weeks  he was forced out his campaign, replaced, mirabile dictu, by Kamala Harris: walking confirmation that senility is not a necessary precondition for gibbering incompetence. As I write, a common entertainment is to compare clips of one-time Biden loyalists assuring the world that – behind closed doors, anyway – he was “sharp as a tack,” “detail-oriented” and “the best Biden ever,” as Joe Scarborough put it last year.

Proximity to power creates a distorting force field. It aids greatly in pushing people over that little hump between “it happened” and “it didn’t happen” – between the embarrassing, dangerous truth and the comforting lie. At least since the disaster of America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the unavoidable but still often-unasked question was: who is running the US government?

That question gained urgency in the waning days of the Biden administration. On January 17, Biden granted 2,490 pardons or commutations, more than any prior president had granted in the course of his entire presidency. I say “Biden granted” – but did he? Or was the clemency extended not by him, but by an auto-pen directed by various aides – Anita Dunn, for example, or Susan Rice or Valerie Jarrett?

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich put his finger on one embarrassing aspect of what I suppose we must call “pen-gate.” “The issue,” he wrote on X, “is not president Biden, who was clearly cognitively incapable of these acts. The issue is who was doing them and what did they get for doing them”?  

David Axelrod, a former chief strategist to Obama, has suggested that Biden’s cancer diagnosis requires us to “mute” criticism of and even inquiry into the burgeoning auto-pen scandal. The opposite is happening. The Constitution stipulates that the president himself sign the legal instruments promulgated in his name. If it turns out that Biden had no idea who many of the people were to whom he granted clemency – and if it turns out further that the process involved some sort of pay-to-play scheme – it would count as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, scandals in the history of the American Republic.

Among other things, it would demonstrate that those who have been warning about the triumph of the “administrative state” or “deep state” over democratic institutions were not “conspiracy theorists” but clear-eyed, patriotic whistleblowers.

History would then regard Biden as a shill operating on behalf of forces that had captured and perverted the constitutional lineaments of the American polity.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2025 World edition.