Then-U.S. president Joe Biden waits to speak about foreign policy at the State Department in Washington, Jan. 13, 2025. The 82-year-old revealed his prostate cancer diagnosis in May, 2025.Susan Walsh/The Associated Press
Repelled from office, blamed by party leaders for the return of Donald Trump to the White House, in virtual seclusion in Delaware and now diagnosed with prostate cancer, Joe Biden is in a position of isolation and recrimination no former president has experienced since Richard Nixon.
No comparison would horrify Mr. Biden more – not a resemblance to James Buchanan or Andrew Johnson (19th-century White House failures largely forgotten today), not a similarity to Herbert Hoover (still blamed for the Great Depression), not a parallel with Jimmy Carter (whose postpresidential activities haven’t wiped away his reputation for presidential fecklessness).
Mr. Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972 by portraying himself as a fresh combatant against the 37th president, especially on the Nixon Vietnam policies. For a year and a half, the 30-year-old Delaware lawmaker opposed Mr. Nixon’s initiatives, though in a speech two months after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, on a 410-4 vote, authorized a formal impeachment inquiry against Mr. Nixon, he urged fellow Democrats to exercise “restraint.”
Now there are few if any Democrats urging restraint in the torrent of recrimination against Mr. Biden as fresh evidence of the former president’s infirmity emerge.
They come with the Tuesday publication of Original Sin, the chronicle of how the Biden White House hid the president’s mental and physical decline, and they stiffen Democrats’ resentment of Mr. Biden for refusing to stand aside from his 2024 re-election bid, for engaging in the dangerous gambit of debating Mr. Trump and for initially resisting demands for his withdrawal from the race.
Indeed, Mr. Biden’s reputation, built in a half-century of public life, including eight years as vice-president, has been besmirched, perhaps permanently, though the announcement that he has advanced prostate cancer may soften the criticism. Even Donald Trump sent good wishes, saying, “We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family.”
Until that diagnosis, revealed over the weekend in a statement from his office and accompanied by assurances that the cancer can be handled with “effective management,” many of his onetime loyalists were spurning him. Mr. Trump has been blaming him for all of America’s ills and deriding him, in a speech late last month, for “drooling out of the side of his mouth.”
President Richard Nixon sits in his White House office, Aug. 16, 1973, as he poses for pictures after delivering a nationwide television address dealing with Watergate.The Canadian Press
For years, the Republicans paid the price for Mr. Nixon’s sins. Watergate and Mr. Nixon’s cover-up were largely responsible for president Gerald Ford’s 1976 defeat and for the Democrats gaining 49 House seats in the 1974 midterm elections. Six of the new Democrats advanced to the Senate and seven over all ran for president. The last “Watergate Baby” retired two years ago, but for more than a half-century they taunted Republicans and buttressed, and then expanded, the liberal state the Trump movement reviles.
The new book, by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and political correspondent Alex Thompson, carries the ominous word “cover-up” on the book jacket, a bracing reprise from the Nixon-era Watergate scandal that lacks subtlety: “President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.” The book – its presales already rank atop several Amazon bestseller categories – shows how Biden aides took steps to limit his physical and mental vulnerabilities and to hide them from public view.
“The original sin of Election 2024,” the authors write, “was Biden’s decision to run for re-election – followed by aggressive efforts to hide his cognitive diminishment.” They describe staffers seeking short walking routes, placing handrails in the president’s path, even considering whether Mr. Biden might have to use a wheelchair after the election. At one point, Mr. Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at the very fundraiser the actor was co-hosting.
It isn’t only Republicans and Mr. Trump, who mentioned Mr. Biden’s name an average of six times a day during his first 100 days in office, who are demonizing the former president.
Just as Republicans condemned Mr. Nixon – seven of the House judiciary committee’s 17 GOP members voted to impeach him, and senator Barry Goldwater, the party’s 1964 presidential nominee, helped ease him from office in 1974 – Democrats are applying the same castigation treatment to Mr. Biden, though he hasn‘t been credibly accused of any crime.
To be sure, most of the former president’s Democratic colleagues like him and respect his decades of service. Many of them are expressing their opprobrium privately, and the cancer diagnosis will dampen their fury somewhat. Those outside the Biden circle who have spoken publicly have been targeted for bitter criticism from those in what The Wall Street Journal described Monday, in an editorial published before the cancer diagnosis, as “the Biden senility cover-up.”
But the critics’ views are widely, perhaps universally, held, and the number and intensity of them grew with the release late last week of the audio recording of Mr. Biden‘s October, 2023, interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated his handling of classified documents.
The recording made the assessment of Mr. Biden’s decline all but irrefutable. In it, Mr. Biden speaks haltingly, with neither confidence nor command. The conversations contain awkward pauses and distracting tangents. He fails to recall when he was vice-president, when Mr. Trump was elected, and even the month and year when his son died.
As a result, the flight from Mr. Biden’s support is as swift, dramatic and decisive as the flood of support the dark-horse presidential candidate received when he defeated Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont by a rate of more than two-to-one in the South Carolina primary in February, 2020, and then glided to the Democratic presidential nomination and eventually the White House.
In his insistence in running for a second term, Mr. Biden listened to the assurances of his aides and the stirrings of his own heart. Instead he might have listened to the counsel of the first president. “Every day,” George Washington said in his 1796 farewell address at the age of 64, “the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.”