Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis is already being exploited

This afternoon Joe Biden’s private office announced that the former president has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. “The cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to his team. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

The details provided feel important. Most men who are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the United States – roughly one in eight over a lifetime – do not die from it. Yet Biden’s team specified in the release that the cancer has spread to other tissue in the body. This suggests the former president is battling a more aggressive form of cancer.

So this release is not simply a health update: it is preparing the public for potentially worse updates in the future.

This is sadly not the Biden family’s first serious encounter with cancer. His son Beau Biden passed away from brain cancer at only 46 years old. The former president boosted resources for cancer research during his first term, relaunching the Cancer Moonshot scheme, with hopes to dramatically decrease cancer deaths over the next 25 years.

America’s top politicians, including many Republicans, are sending the former president their thoughts and prayers. “The Johnson family will be joining the countless others who are praying for the former president in the wake of his diagnosis,” shared the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson. “Praying for former President Joe Biden as he battles prostate cancer,” said House Majority Leader Republican Steve Scalise. President Trump took to Truth Social to share some thoughtful words: “Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.” This followed a fundraising email from the President titled “God spared my life for a reason,” which landed in inboxes just after the health announcement.

This harrowing news is a dramatic turn away from the past few weeks, when Joe and Jill Biden were jointly touring media studios to insist the President was in rude health during his time in the White House. It came ahead of the publication of Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again – which claim to lift the lid on what was really happening in the White House, and who was running the country, during Biden’s term in office.

The tour didn’t go well. Biden’s age and frail mental state were on full display. The former first lady made the book’s point for its authors, as she jumped in to speak on behalf of her husband, who was struggling to form his sentences. Flash forward only a few days, and the resistance is over. The former president is sick and it sounds like it’s serious. It’s a tragedy. It’s also the end of that debate.

Now, a new debate is kicking off: is it appropriate to keep discussing Biden’s health? A vocal group will insist that an elderly, retired statesman should be left in peace as he undergoes treatment. Another, equally loud group will want to use this update to highlight further the cover-up that took place in the months (and years) leading up to the 2024 election. Both will have a point. It is likely that the story moves away from Biden himself – who deserves the best circumstances to fight this cancer – and onto the many healthy people around him who were determined to see him run the country for four more years. Expect the knives to sharpen: it was in the interest of many to see full responsibility for the Democrat’s 2024 catastrophe pinned on Biden. If the punches are increasingly withheld for him, they are going to land elsewhere.

The horrors of cancer are often unavoidable: the result of cruel genetic or environmental factors that render some of us very unlucky. Yet the growing narrative around Joe Biden is a tragedy of a different kind: the avoidable kind. This terrible health update should not be used as a tool to score political points – but it will be, in part because of the insistence, even just a few days ago, that everything has been fine. It is the ugliest kind of politics, and we’re about to be in the thick of it.