We’ve become so accustomed to corruption in our politics that it probably sounds hyperbolic to contend that any one scandal is perhaps the biggest in American history. But the cover-up of former President Joe Biden’s mental and physical deterioration is up there. It involved government officials and pliant press propping up a cancer-ridden man who was clearly unable to perform the most rudimentary tasks of the most important job in the world. 

If Biden had skipped the presidential debate with Donald Trump, as many Democrats, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), urged him to do, White House lackeys and the obliging media would have continued concealing the president’s deteriorating condition. They, no doubt, would have done it all the way to Election Day and into his second term, should Biden have won. 

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We still have no clue who participated. We have seen no reckoning by reporters or Democrats who participated in the sham. Sure, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new book, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, has sparked discussion about the former president’s state. The problem is that the book is written by reporters as if they are merely spectators rather than participants. 

Original Sin is like All the President’s Men if the latter hadn’t named any of the men and had been written by John Ehrlichman.

It gets worse. This week, Biden disclosed that he’s suffering from aggressive Stage 4 prostate cancer. When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jefferies (D-NY) was asked if the former president should have been more open about his health problems, he responded, “There are Republicans who are peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward.”

Well, virtually every alleged conspiracy theory regarding Biden over the past five years has turned out to be true. The Hunter Biden laptop story was real. The contention that the president knew about, and probably led, his family’s corrupt influence-peddling enterprise was true. The claim that Biden’s mental acuity was seriously impaired is now inarguable.

So, it’s also wholly reasonable, even necessary at this point, to figure out what happened. Did Biden or his handlers know the president had an aggressive form of cancer? Did he have it when he ran in 2024? How about in 2020? 

Almost every oncologist interviewed on the topic says Biden’s type of prostate cancer would have been around for several years, perhaps a decade. Biden “did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021. Yes, I don’t think there’s any disagreement about that,” Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist and Democrat who was Biden’s White House COVID adviser, told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who not long ago was passionately assuring us that Biden was “as sharp as anybody” he’d spoken to in years. 

William Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society, said, “We definitely would anticipate that he has had prostate cancer for many, many years.” So, doctors examining an octogenarian U.S. president and missing an aggressive cancer for years is about as plausible as White House reporters failing to notice his deteriorating mental state. 

Biden, of course, never released full medical records, only summaries, despite headlines claiming otherwise (Trump has also only released summaries). Did doctors believe conducting a blood test for cancer wasn’t necessary at Biden’s age? Or did they administer it and then hide the results from the public? Or did the president refuse to take one? 

You can call it a conspiracy theory, but considering what went on in the Biden White House, lying about cancer seems quite plausible. After all, there’s a strong possibility that serious decisions regarding foreign and domestic policy were made by unelected officials and handlers rather than the president. Yet not one person in the White House thought it was important enough to blow the whistle. The other possibility is that a president who forgets the names of his Cabinet and the year his son died was making major, generational decisions for the public and the world. And, again, not one person in the White House thought it was important enough to blow the whistle. 

Was Biden even in control when 13 American servicemen were murdered in the administration’s deadly botched withdrawal from Afghanistan? Did Biden know what was happening when pushing a giant inflation-sparking reform bill that sank his presidency, or did he simply repeat the inanities written for him by his daft aides?

Was it Biden who thought it was wise to use an autopen to issue unprecedented 10-year blanket retroactive pardons to his family and political allies, or was it his family and political allies who came up with the idea?

Feel free to grouse all you like about the sycophancy surrounding Trump. It’s a problem. It is clear that Democrats put their love of power over their love of country. 

Ideally, it is the journalist’s job to figure out what happened and who was responsible. Democracy dies in darkness, and all that. And that’s the rub. 

It would be a waste of space to list all the media outlets that participated in the attempted gaslighting of the public over Biden’s obvious cognitive deterioration. Let’s just say every one of them participated to some degree. At best, the media disseminated exactly what government officials told them, or, at worst, they helped with the cover-up. There is overwhelming evidence of the latter, from the expediently discovered lifelong stuttering problem to the attacks on then-special counsel Robert Hur, who, unlike White House reporters, needed only a few hours with the president to understand that he was an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

And there are a few heroes in Original Sin. One person who emerges well is Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), who, according to Tapper and Thompson, attempted to tell Biden the truth about his presidential prospects after the disastrous first presidential debate. (So not exactly stepping out on a ledge.) 

First lady Jill Biden, we learn, whisked her husband away from the governor. It’s clear that by the time of the first presidential debate, the first lady was controlling what the president was hearing. You may recall Jill Biden sending out pictures of herself “prepping” for the G7 or sitting in a Cabinet meeting. “Jill Biden joined a Cabinet meeting to give a women’s health update,” the aggressively unreliable PolitiFact assured voters. “She’s not running the US.” Are we still sure about that? 

It is likely that Jill Biden emerged to assure voters that the president was in good hands. When Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst presidents when he was conscious, had a debilitating stroke in 1919, his wife Edith famously took over the job for 15 months. With the help of the president’s doctor, Edith Wilson covered up her husband’s mental and physical breakdown and hid it from the voters and the press. It was a lot easier to get away with in those days. And though she had never been elected to office, Edith Wilson made a slew of major domestic and foreign policy decisions. The question is, who was making those policy decisions for Joe Biden for four years? If not Jill Biden, then who? It’s an important question for the historical record. And it’s important because we should know who was involved moving forward.  

DEMOCRATS MUST ADDRESS THEIR CREDIBILITY CANCER BEFORE IT SPREADS

Now, there’s a tendency for people to excuse Biden’s role in this because of his age and to blame others exclusively. One hopes Biden recovers from his ailment. It should not be forgotten, though, that the former president has always been reckless and unscrupulous. A blowhard senator, a world champion fabulist and boor, the patriarch of a corrupt family, Biden didn’t hold a single consistent principle in his long career. A man who refused to acknowledge his granddaughter’s existence for years because it was bad for his political prospects is not above lying about his health. Indeed, any patriot, or even a marginally conscientious person, would never have run for the presidency in his condition. He deserves lots of blame. 

But, no, he is not alone.