News of former president Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis prompted Americans of all persuasions to offer prayers and sympathy, writes The Telegraph.

“Human decency like that, transcending political differences, is laudable. Whatever our political differences, Biden and his family deserve our compassion.

What’s unusual is the scepticism – indeed, cynicism – surrounding the announcement, which came just before the release of a major book about Biden’s cognitive decline and its cover-up. There have been questions about whether officials knew about the cancer while he was in office and hid that from the public. Those doubts have been voiced by numerous specialists, including physicians who held high positions in Democratic administrations.

This cynicism is the bitter fruit of four years of the Biden administration’s deceit on countless basic issues, including the former president’s health. Americans were repeatedly told that “the president is mentally sharp and incredibly energetic”. That simply wasn’t true, and everyone knew it.

Still, some Democrats are attempting to downplay everything that happened over the past four years, as if it is old news that can be safely buried now that Donald Trump is in the White House. They won’t get away with it. The scandal surrounding Biden’s cognitive decline is the biggest in modern US political history.

In fact, there are three scandals, each reinforcing the other two. First, and most obviously, there is the blunt fact of the former president’s fading mental capacity. Second, there was the concerted cover-up, both by Democratic politicians and the mainstream media. The third is the still-unanswered question: who was actually making presidential decisions? Who controlled the auto-pen that signed almost every order from the Oval Office? To rephrase Senator Howard Baker’s pointed question during the Nixon-Watergate hearings: “What did the president not know? And when did he not know it?”

Biden’s decline

The crux of the Biden scandal centres on his cognitive capacity. It should be clear by now, even to partisan Democrats, that his mental acuity was diminished throughout his presidency, and more seriously so in the last two years. There’s a good reason Biden rarely spoke extemporaneously and didn’t take a cognitive exam during his annual physicals. What he presumably feared was what the whole world witnessed during his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump. Voters gasped as they watched Biden stare blankly and mumble incomplete sentences. Democratic Party leaders, who had zealously hidden Biden’s impairment, now saw their emperor standing naked before the public.

Biden’s cognitive descent has been driven home by two events in the past few weeks. One was the launch of the first major book on the subject, with extensive, behind-the-scenes reporting. The synopsis is that he was sometimes alert, sometimes not, and that his mental fog worsened in 2023 and 2024. One telling anecdote is that Biden attended a big-money fundraiser hosted by George Clooney, greeted him, but didn’t know who he was. Remember, we are talking here about the president of the United States, the most powerful person on the planet, the man who holds the nuclear codes, and makes the fateful decision about their use. Being alert is not optional for the job.

The second event was the release of a damning audio tape of President Biden’s 2023 interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. The Special Counsel was tasked with deciding whether Biden had committed felonies during his years as vice-president, when he possessed stacks of classified documents and kept them for years in unsecured locations, like his garage.

Hur ultimately decided not to charge Biden, in large part because of the president’s condition. As the Special Counsel stated in his report: “At trial, Mr Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.

Poor memory puts it mildly. We saw that in the interview transcript, which was pried from the clutches of Biden’s department of justice. But what the president’s appointees adamantly didn’t want to do was release the tape itself. Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to do so, without offering a good explanation.

Now we know why. The tape is damning. Biden’s responses were a tangle of stumbles, mistakes, forgetfulness, and utter confusion. To take one example, he couldn’t remember the years when he had been vice-president. He needed assistance from his ghostwriter, who was inexplicably allowed to join him for the interview”, - writes the author of the article.