Democrats should call for more honesty about Joe Biden’s health

The announcement of former president Joe Biden’s diagnosis for advanced prostate cancer is of course a sad event, as it would be with any president’s cancer diagnosis. For the human side, the prayers and sympathies of the nation should be with him and his family. But coming as it does after years of hiding the true nature of Biden’s health – including repeated lies told by his staff, family and those closest to him to the American people – it should lead to even more questions about the truth of his condition, and what we were not told as voters who deserve to trust our top institutions to be honest to us.

The natural inclination is to believe the announcement itself is suspiciously timed, coming as it does between the release of the damning Robert Hur audio and the much-hyped book by Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper about the Biden cover-up. But setting that aside, the deeper concern should be the need to know how long this was going on, why the public notes from the president’s medical team made no mention of it and if and when the president began treatment for the disease.

Washington is used to assuming that details about the president’s health are fudged and often massaged in a more positive direction. Who can forget the hour-long press conference that elevated White House physician (now Republican Congressman) Ronny Jackson to the heights of mockery for his positive reports about President Trump’s health status? But for something like prostate cancer to go unreported, if it truly had been previously diagnosed or was spotted while the president was in office, is utterly unacceptable.

The Democratic party has been rocked in recent years by one incident after another where they have tried to hide the truth from the American people, and this scandal – and it is a scandal – will do them no favors in rebuilding institutional trust. Besides the obvious negative reaction here surrounding the Biden-Harris administration, Democratic leaders and their supporters in the media need to understand the gift they continually offer up to the Republicans, who can repeatedly claim, as President Trump does, that they are the party of transparency. That’s why bipartisan calls for more honesty about the president’s true medical condition are so important, and they shouldn’t stop out of sympathy for a family that has already been through so much. This can’t be allowed to happen again.

As Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut admitted on Meet the Press Sunday, Democrats brought the second Trump presidency on themselves: “I think we all bear responsibility. Listen, and I think, you know, we maybe didn’t listen as early as we should have, in part because we have immense loyalty to this man… But ultimately, in retrospect, you can’t defend what the Democratic party did because we are stuck with a mad man, with a corrupt president in the Oval Office, and we should have given ourselves a better chance to win.”