Twenty-four hours after the Sunday announcement that former President Joe Biden has an aggressive form of prostate cancer, one of his staunchest supporters, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, said Monday he had yet to connect with him. Another close Hill ally, Sen. Chris Coons, had not spoken with his fellow Delawarean as of midafternoon Tuesday.
Biden’s longtime friend Bob Brady, the former House member from Pennsylvania who has known Biden for decades, said as of Tuesday afternoon that he hadn’t talked with the former president directly since his cancer diagnosis, though he did touch base Monday with his family. All three said they planned to speak with him soon.
Before his cancer diagnosis, Biden had been taking the train from Delaware to Washington, meeting with his post-presidential staff, allies and former Cabinet secretaries, according to a Biden aide granted anonymity to speak freely. In New York City for his appearance on “The View,” he met with former President Bill Clinton. And last week he met with Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a rising star in the party.
But Biden, an inveterate creature of Washington who for most of his career seemed to gain life from glad-handing and working a room, hasn’t yet talked to some longtime allies on Capitol Hill in the wake of his diagnosis. Months removed from his presidency, Biden has receded as a fixture of official Washington and has instead become a focal point of his party’s recriminations — his planned reemergence after departing the White House running headlong into a devastating health diagnosis and an unsettled party growing increasingly anxious in the wilderness.
Some Democrats said they are drafting notes or plan to speak with him. Coons said he was working on finding a time to connect with Biden. Sen. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware said she has reached out to people ”very close” to the family “and just shared my love, my prayers.” Politicians on both sides of the aisle wished him well.
Most Democrats are trying, yet again, to pivot from Biden’s health to stay on message as the GOP advances President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda.
Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, the only former Biden White House aide who now serves in Congress, faulted Biden’s critics for capitalizing on what he called the “politics of the moment.”
“It’s in their interest to talk about this rather than the issues of the day, so we’re stuck in that unfortunate reality,” Amo said. “I hope that people are focused on one, a legacy of public service, and two, wishing him well in his recovery.”
Or as Rep. Veronica Escobar of Texas, a Biden reelection co-chair, put it, “We are living through a historic, terrifying backsliding of our democracy … I am so profoundly uninterested in talking about this issue.”
Not everyone wants to change the subject. Some Democrats, perhaps feeling burned by how Biden’s decline was kept out of public view, are asking pointed questions about his cancer diagnosis — both publicly and privately.
On Monday, Ezekiel Emanuel, the oncologist and Biden’s former pandemic adviser, opened the door on MSNBC’s Biden-friendly “Morning Joe” to a round of questions about Biden’s health when he said that Biden “did not develop [cancer] 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.”
At best for Democrats, his remarks scanned to some observers as concern about the care the president received while in office. At worst, they fueled more accusations of a White House cover-up.
In a Monday interview, Emanuel said he could not rule out the possibility that Biden had been diagnosed earlier but that information somehow wasn’t released.
“Look, I’m not his doctor,” Emanuel said. “I can’t rule out that possibility because I don’t know what transpired there.”
A spokesperson for Biden said Tuesday the former president’s “last known” prostate-specific antigen cancer screening test was in 2014 and that “prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer.”
This isn’t the first time Biden has faced health challenges. When he was running for vice president in 2008, Biden disclosed that he had an enlarged prostate and a biopsy but that no evidence of cancer was found. His medical records also showed he had undergone prostate-specific antigen tests, which yielded normal results.
More than a decade later, when he was campaigning for the White House in 2019, Biden revealed he had been treated for his enlarged prostate, first with medication and later with surgery. The files stated he “never had prostate cancer.”
Trump seized on questions surrounding the timeline of diagnosis — something that had quickly become an obsession of Biden’s right-wing detractors online — telling reporters he was “surprised that it wasn’t, you know, the public wasn’t notified a long time ago because to get to stage 9, that’s a long time.” (Biden’s diagnosis is stage-four prostate cancer.) Vice President JD Vance said he blamed the “people around” Biden.
Asked about new allegations of a conspiracy to keep Biden’s illness secret, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said of Republicans advancing the idea, “What a soulless bunch. Anybody who’s spending time doing that, I’ll pray for him in mass this Sunday.”
To some allies of Biden, who relied on a small and, critics said, insular circle of advisers during his presidency, even acknowledging such questions is fraught.
“This just feeds into the conspiracy theories. You have an electorate who doesn’t pay attention, and this is breaking through,” said Democratic strategist Kellan White, who worked as a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign in Pennsylvania in 2024. “All a Gen Z voter who barely pays attention is hearing is, ‘They weekend-at-Bernie-ed Joe Biden who now has cancer, which he probably had for 10 years.’”
Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Del.), who’s long been close to the Bidens, said in a brief interview she’d sent a message to the former president through his team and “and expressed that I was praying for him and reiterated that he’s in the hearts of every Delawarean right now.”
She said she’d spoken to him last at a St. Patrick’s Day event in Wilmington and “he seemed in good spirits. He seemed healthy.”
Biden’s diagnosis came just as some of the Democratic Party’s brightest stars had begun to grapple with questions about ramifications of his decision to run for reelection — and the fallout for the party.
“The historians will have to sort out the politics of the whole thing,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who weathered his own cancer diagnosis, said in an interview.
He added that he had not spoken to Biden but was drafting him a note. He said, “But at this point, there’s nothing to do, but for those of us who love the guy, to express our solidarity and our sympathy.”
