President Donald Trump‘s handling of former President Joe Biden‘s recent prostate cancer diagnosis has vacillated between expressing sympathy over the seriousness of the illness and calling for transparency surrounding his predecessor’s tenure.
“Look, it’s a very sad thing, what happened,” Trump said to reporters about Biden on Tuesday as he met with House Republicans to push for his “one big, beautiful bill.”
Then, Trump segued into a concern about whether Biden was too incapacitated while in office to govern, focusing on his use of an autopen.
“We’re going to start looking into this whole thing with who signed this legislation,” Trump continued. “Who signed legislation opening our border? I don’t think he knew. I said, ‘There’s nobody that could want an open border. Nobody.’ And now I find out that it wasn’t him. He autopenned it.”
While Democrats have urged a pause on public scrutiny of Biden after his diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer that spread to his bones, Trump and his allies have expressed skepticism about the timeline and spotlighted the need for more investigation.
The initial outpouring of support for Biden after the cancer diagnosis coincided with the release of the new book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios, about top aides working to conceal Biden’s deteriorating cognitive abilities from the public while supporting him in seeking a second term in office.
The news that Biden, with access to the best healthcare in the world, could have gone undiagnosed with cancer during his presidency added to the distrust of Democrats who defended Biden’s fitness during public cognitive lapses, such as on the 2024 debate stage.
After Trump reupped the need for an autopen investigation, House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-KY) obliged, adding that senior Biden aides will be called to testify to find out who was really running the country.
“President Trump is asking the right question: Who authorized and controlled the autopen in Joe Biden’s White House? This is the biggest cover-up in American history,” Comer said.
TRUMP QUESTIONS TIMELINE OF BIDEN’S CANCER DIAGNOSIS: ‘DANGEROUS FOR OUR COUNTRY’
Trump alleged Tuesday that Biden’s closest aides were treasonous and “took over” Biden’s autopen to enact a liberal agenda.
“They stole the Presidency of the United States, and put us in Great Danger,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“This is TREASON at the Highest Level!” he added. “They did it to destroy our Country.”
High-profile Democrats have decried the questioning surrounding Biden’s mental decline and his 2024 campaign after he unveiled the illness.
“I think those kinds of discussions are going to happen, but they should be more muted and set aside for now as he’s sort of struggling through this,” political strategist David Axelrod told CNN.
“It seems to me entirely inappropriate that at this moment in time when President Biden is dealing with a serious and aggressive form of cancer, there are Republicans who are peddling conspiracy theories and want us to look backward at a time when they actually are taking healthcare away from the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told reporters.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, White House spokesman Harrison Fields said Democrats set the tone with their heated rhetoric as Trump survived two assassination attempts last year.
“Democrats crying foul and demanding a toning down of rhetoric have no standing to speak after their words and actions contributed to multiple assassination attempts on President Trump and devastating violence across our nation,” Fields said. “Addressing the wrongs of the previous administration is by no means disrespectful; it’s what the American people elected President Trump to do.”
Allegations that Biden allies clandestinely hid his declining cognitive health from the public reached fever pitch in the weeks before Biden’s diagnosis.
Last week’s release of the audio recording of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with Biden contributed to more questions over who had knowledge of the former president’s decline. The audio showed Biden struggling to answer Hur’s questions.
The timing of Biden’s aggressive prostate cancer metastasizing to his bones fueled even more speculation that the former president hid the diagnosis from the public.
“I’m surprised the public wasn’t notified a long time ago,” Trump said Monday. “To get to [Gleason score grade] nine, that’s a long time.”
Critics noted that a prostate-specific antigen blood test would likely have shown warning signs of the cancer. But Biden’s presidential physical examinations, conducted by Dr. Kevin O’Connor, did not include results of the PSA, in contrast to Trump, whose physicals did show normal PSA results.
“There are things going on that the public wasn’t informed of,” Trump said Monday. “I think somebody is going to have to speak to his doctor if it’s the same or even if it’s two separate doctors. Why wasn’t the cognitive ability? Why wasn’t that discussed? And I think the doctor said he’s just fine, and it’s turned out that’s not.”
“This is dangerous for our country,” Trump said.
A Biden spokesperson eventually confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Tuesday that his “last known PSA test was in 2014. Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer.”
In a similar pattern to Trump, Vice President JD Vance sympathized with Biden before launching into a critique of the last administration.
“We wish the best for the former president’s health, and you know, it sounds pretty serious, but hopefully he makes the right recovery,” Vance told reporters Monday. “I will say, whether the right time to have this conversation is now or at some point in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job.”
“That’s not politics, that’s not because I disagreed with him on policy, that’s because I don’t think that he was in good enough health,” Vance added. “In some ways, I blame him less than I blame the people around him.”
GOP strategists say Biden’s tenure is fair game for scrutiny in the wake of the recent reporting about his mental decline and illness.
“There’s not a single new question, attack, or issue that Republicans have brought up since the diagnosis that wasn’t already the topics of focus and conversation before,” said Aaron Evans, president of Winning Republican Strategies.
Evans said the government must do what is in the best interest of the public, “and if there are genuine issues that need to be resolved and fixed, it’s their obligation to do that,” he said. “Someone’s cancer diagnosis does not stop that process. And again, that does not mean that there’s not sympathy and compassion for the diagnosis.”
“We already know that mentally, maybe he was having some challenges. Was he also physically having some challenges?” asked Sarah Chamberlain, president and CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership. “I think it’s fair to ask that. I think it’s fair to ask that of every president.”
BIDEN SKIPPED RELEASING PHYSICAL TEST RESULTS THAT MAY HAVE CAUGHT PROSTATE CANCER
Brian Seitchick, a national GOP strategist, said the public wants answers.
“This is simply a question of competence and capability,” Seitchick said, “and whether it was a threat to the safety of the United States of America that Joe Biden was the man in charge of nuclear weapons and was making decisions.”
