Former President Joe Biden announced yesterday that he is suffering from an aggressive form of prostate cancer. As prayers and goodwill rightly poured in from both sides of the political aisle, the context and timing of the announcement is worth scrutinizing. CNN anchor Jake Tapper and film director Alex Thompson will release their book ‘Original Sin’ tomorrow. In the book, they pull back the curtain on the extent of Biden’s physical and mental decline during his presidency. In spite of his mental decline in recent years, Biden has spent his life in politics. He has mastered the art of controlling the narrative.
Biden Press
Joe Biden is no stranger to deflecting in the media. Throughout the last two years of his Presidency, his son Hunter’s criminal misdeeds were a constant feature in the news. Political watchers noticed a trend that a development in an investigation into Donald Trump followed each damning development in Hunter’s own investigation. Further, a Wall Street Journal article in June 2023 suggested that the Biden team took advantage of the Titan Submersible story to bury an update in Hunter’s investigation. According to the Journal, the US Navy detected the sound of the implosion as it happened but declined to make the announcement for a week. A week of pop culture and memes about the tragedy let Hunter’s plea deal for tax evasion and illegal gun possession virtually disappear. The deal was so shady that the presiding judge refused to authorize it a month later.
Selective campaigning
Even Biden campaign news over the years has taken this approach towards controlling the narrative. In 2020, Biden claimed he didn’t run in 2016 due to the death of his son, Beau, in 2015. It was Trump’s disastrous presidency which compelled him to leave retirement and run for office, he claimed. Insiders report, however, that Obama refused to support a Biden candidacy in 2016, rendering it dead on arrival. Even his 2024 withdrawal was a stroke of controlling the narrative. Insiders report that it was not Biden’s decision. In a final clap-back at a party that betrayed him, he offered his unwavering support to his Vice President, who he knew would lose. Biden has followed up on this move. He has repeatedly claimed that he had a better chance at beating Trump than Harris. An odd move for her chief endorser, this is clearly an attempt to control the narrative for the history books. Biden was cast aside in favor of a disaster candidate. Details be damned.
Original Sin
With such a track record, it is hard to believe that Biden’s cancer diagnosis announcement is a mere coincidence. While his statement claimed the diagnosis came on Friday, the advanced nature of it suggests that it may not be news to the Biden family. White House reporters are already asking if Biden’s White House physician will be held to account for missing it. Experts are out in force claiming that Biden likely knew about his diagnosis even prior to his 2020 election campaign. A video has resurfaced of Biden referring to his cancer diagnosis during his Presidency. At the time, the White House claimed that this was a gaffe.
Biden Pressure
On May 8, Politico reported that Biden engaged a PR crisis expert to manage the fallout from ‘Original Sin’. Previews of the book indicate that White House aides considered Biden to need a wheelchair due to his rapid decline. They decided to wait until after the election to make this move in order to defeat Trump one last time. On top of this, the Trump administration has campaigned on releasing the full, unedited recording of the Hur interviews. These interviews, conducted by Special Counsel Robert Hur in October 2023, were part of an investigation into various felony accusations against Joe Biden. In February 2024, Hur announced he was dropping all charges. He claimed that Biden did not present cognitively capable of undergoing a criminal trial. Some tapes of these interviews leaked on Saturday, accelerating claims of a coverup by the last administration. A well-timed cancer diagnosis, then, buried the lead and is putting public pressure on Tapper and Thompson to postpone – if not cancel – their book launch tomorrow. A happy coincidence for the Biden family.
Trump joins in
Lest we look too cynically on Joe Biden, he is not the only politician burying stories or trying to control narratives. Last weekend, Trump announced he intended to keep the $400M ‘floating palace’ gifted to him by Qatar, despite being obviously unconstitutional. This story possibly buried another story (successfully!) but within a few days it got out of hand. Prolonged focus on the Qatar story and Trump’s otherwise successful Middle East trip led to less edifying links between the Trump Administration and Qatar coming to the surface. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff have all had previous relationships with Qatar that may indicate that the Administration’s friendliness towards the country is perhaps more personal than diplomatic. When former FBI Director, James Comey, posted ‘86 47’, the reaction was somewhat heavy-handed from the Administration. Allegedly a call to assassinate the President, this post was more likely a call for impeachment. But never let a good story get in the way of an accurate one, especially when you have a week of Biden content about to drop.
Politics is dirty and the press is a tool. With an abundance of sources and a dearth of neutrality, readers must never take the news for granted. Chances are, if something is making the headlines, the real story is buried six feet below.
