Hunter Biden says Joe Biden’s cancer is spreading

Former President Joe Biden’s cancer has spread to other parts of his body, his son Hunter Biden revealed in an interview, describing the disease as “very painful” and “very debilitating.”

“The cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,” he told the BBC’s “Newsnight” Friday. “It’s really sad to watch.”

Several months after leaving the White House, the former president announced in May 2025 that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. At the time, his office said the cancer appeared to be “hormone-sensitive,” allowing for “effective management.”

Hunter Biden became emotional during the interview while discussing his father’s condition, saying that watching the former president’s health decline has been “really hard.”

“The only thing that I’d say about my dad, about his health right now, is I wish he would complain more, because it’s not good,” he said.

Despite the cancer’s progression, Hunter Biden said his 83-year-old father remains active and engaged in public life.

Read the rest here. 

How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration

In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.

Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.

But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.

“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.

They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Mr. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations.

The warnings came true, and then some. After Mr. Biden became president, migrant encounters at the southern border quickly doubled, then kept rising. New arrivals overwhelmed border stations, then border towns, and eventually major cities like New York and Denver.

Anger over illegal migration helped return Mr. Trump to the presidency, and he has enacted even more aggressive policies than those Mr. Biden first campaigned against. Mr. Trump has drawn outrage from Democrats by sending masked agents to target immigrants, often aided by National Guard soldiers.

But a New York Times examination of Mr. Biden’s record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.

Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants — including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn — made two crucial errors.

First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration — believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters, and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters. Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Mr. Trump in 2024.

Read the rest here.

Mr. Biden

On May 19, 2024 the NY Times ran a an op-ed piece under the following headline...

Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It)

To which I posted the following comment...

Politically, it would be helpful if the Democrats did not nominate a man who is in his 80's, with the demeanor of a man in in his 90s.

Seriously. Can we take a moment to address the elephant in the living room? Life expectancy for the average adult male in the US is 77(ish). If he is re-elected, he would be almost ten years beyond that point at the end of his second term of office. Even assuming he is in excellent health for a man of his age, and I have no reason to believe he isn't, you just cannot make safe assumptions about someone's long term health once they get into their 80s. Given his age and the average life expectancy of people who do make it into their early 80s, statistics suggest that the odds of Mr. Biden being able to complete another four years as president are not good. Once you get to that age, things do start to go wrong. 

I think we would have to go back to 1944 for the last time a major party nominated someone who was less likely to be able to serve a full four-year term as president. And in fact, FDR died just months into his fourth term. I don't know who the next president will be. But if Mr. Biden wins the election; I suspect the next president after him will be Kamala Harris.

Obviously, a great deal has transpired since then.  

Joe Biden Inducted into Freemasonry

Via Rorate comes this report that the 46th President of the United States (nominally a Catholic) has been inducted into Freemasonry. It is worth noting that this was done by a Prince Hall Lodge, a historically African-American branch of the Craft founded at a time when blacks were generally barred from mainstream Masonry (AF&AM) here in the United States.

How Biden’s Inner Circle Protected a Faltering President

The people closest to President Biden were well aware that he had changed. He talked more slowly than he had just a few years before, needed to hoist himself out of his seat in the presidential limousine and walked with a halting gait.

“Your biggest issue is the perception of age,” Mike Donilon, the president’s longtime strategist, told him in mid-2022, according to three close aides who heard it. That bit of feedback, delivered repeatedly by Mr. Donilon, was the sort of blunt talk that did not often make its way to a man who had spent a half-century in politics prizing loyalty and deference.

Mr. Biden acknowledged the concerns, but the warnings only ignited his defiant, competitive streak. In April 2023, without convening his family or having long deliberations with aides, he announced he was running again.

Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump heads back to the White House, demoralized Democrats debate what might have been had the president bowed out in time to let a younger generation run. Mr. Biden, 82, has at the same time made the extraordinary admission that he might not have made it through a second term. “Who knows what I’m going to be when I’m 86 years old?” he said in an interview with USA Today on Jan. 5.

The president’s acknowledgment has put a new spotlight on his family and inner circle, all of whom dismissed concerns from voters and Mr. Biden’s own party that he was too old for the job. And yet they recognized his physical frailty to a greater degree than they have publicly acknowledged. Then they cooperated, according to interviews with more than two dozen aides, allies, lawmakers and donors, to manage his decline.

They rearranged meetings to make sure Mr. Biden was in a better mood — a strategy one person close to him described as how aides should handle any president. At times, they delayed sharing information with him, including negative polling data, as they debated the best way to frame it. They surrounded him with aides when he walked from the White House to the waiting presidential helicopter on the South Lawn so that news cameras could not capture his awkward bearing.

Read the rest here.

The Biden Presidency: Four Illusions, Four Deceptions

Americans tend to have a soft spot for our former presidents. Even the bad ones.

By the time Richard Nixon died in 1994, his presidency was as likely to be lauded for the opening to China or the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency as it was to be damned for Watergate. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, furiously condemned at the time as a dirty political bargain, was later celebrated as an example of selfless statesmanship. Jimmy Carter’s reputational resurrection — not just for the way he conducted his post-presidency, but also for his acts in office — would have astounded the country that sent him packing in 1980 amid stagflation and a hostage crisis.

Will Joe Biden enjoy a similar place in our national memory? It’s possible, and his administration had its achievements: NATO enlargement, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, defending Ukraine and Israel, strengthening alliances in the Pacific.

But Biden’s presidency will also be remembered for four big illusions — and four big deceptions. They will not serve his legacy well.

The illusions: first, that the 2021 surge in migration was seasonal (“happens every single solitary year,” as Biden said that March); second, that the Taliban would not swiftly seize Afghanistan (“the likelihood there’s going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely,” as he said that July); third, that inflation was transitory (“Our experts believe, and the data shows, that most of the price increases we’ve seen are expected to be temporary,” also that July).

The fourth, and the biggest: that he was the best Democratic candidate to defeat Donald Trump: “I beat him once, and I will beat him again,” he often insisted, even after the debate debacle.

That last illusion was pure hubris. But there was an arrogance to the first three, since he was loudly alerted (including by, well, me) on each point that he was making a fundamental mistake. The White House spent months in 2021 refusing to use the term “crisis” for the border — it was, instead, a “challenge.” Pentagon leaders warned the president that the Afghan government would soon collapse if the United States withdrew. Biden shrugged. Larry Summers was outspoken about the inflationary risks of Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Biden ignored that, too.

Read the rest here.

Report: Biden's decline started much earlier and staff hid it

The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell report Thursday, based on interviews with nearly 50 people knowledgeable of the operations of the Biden White House. The story details the extent to which the president’s age has posed an issue throughout his presidency, including from the very start, and the lengths to which aides went to conceal it.

President Biden, now 82, was 78 years old when he took office, and the Journal reports that administration officials began to notice signs of his age “in just the first few months of his term,” as he would grow “tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.”

Those who met with the president were reportedly told that “exchanges should be short and focused.” Meetings were strategically scheduled and, sometimes, if Biden “was having an off day,” they were simply canceled. A former aide recalled a national security official saying, regarding one rescheduled meeting, “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow.”

The Journal reported that lawmakers, Cabinet members, and the public all seemed to have less face time with the president than in previous administrations and that senior advisers were “often put into roles that some administration officials and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy.” Namely, administration officials like Jake Sullivan, Steve Ricchetti, and Lael Brainard frequently functioned as intermediaries for the president.

Read the rest here. 

Ross Douthat and David French on the Hunter Biden Pardon

Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, hosted an online conversation with the Times Opinion columnists Ross Douthat and David French about President Biden’s decision to issue a broad pardon to his son Hunter Biden.

Patrick Healy: Ross and David, you both have written extensively about the rule of law and presidential power. You both have a good sense of what American voters care about. And you both are fathers. So I’m curious what struck you most about President Biden’s statement that he was pardoning his son Hunter Biden.

David French: As a father, I think it would be very, very hard to watch your son go to prison — especially if you have the power to set him free. I can’t imagine the pain of watching Hunter’s long battle with substance abuse and then watching his conviction in court. But in his role as president, Biden’s primary responsibility is to the country and the Constitution, not his family.

As president, this pardon represents a profound failure. Biden was dishonest — he told us that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter — and this use of the pardon power reeks of the kind of royal privilege that is antithetical to America’s republican values.

Healy: Biden’s decision to rule out the pardon while running for re-election was an enormous misjudgment. At the same time, David — Hunter Biden didn’t harm anyone, and pardons go to people with connections all the time now. I want to understand your umbrage on behalf of “the country and the Constitution” a bit better.

French: When Biden issued the pardon, my first thought was “here we go again.” It’s exactly this kind of self-dealing and favoritism that has created such cynicism in this country, and the fact that pardon abuse is almost routine at this point isn’t a defense of Biden. It’s an indictment of a political class that helped lay the groundwork for Donald Trump — a much worse figure, by the way, but one that did not arise in an otherwise-healthy moment in American democracy.

Ross Douthat: I think it’s important to stress that Biden always kept Hunter close, within the larger aura of his own power, in ways that likely helped his son trade on his dad’s name even as his own life was completely out of control. This pardon is a continuation or completion of that closeness: It’s a moral failure, as David says, a dereliction, but one that’s of a piece with the president’s larger inability to create a sustained separation between his own position and his troubled son’s lifestyle and business dealings and place in the family’s inner circle. A clearer separation would have been better not just for the president and the country, but also for Hunter himself — even if he’s benefiting from it now, at the last.

Healy: Ross, Hunter Biden should absolutely be held accountable for his actions — that’s something that 12-step programs make clear to addicts, in fact: Their addiction is no excuse for breaking the law, for instance. But it seems like you are conflating Biden’s legitimate powers as president with how you think he should have regarded his son in office.

Douthat: I’m not saying that Biden’s pardon of Hunter is categorically worse than prior presidents’ use of the power to help out cronies and donors and the like. But most people regarded, say, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich as scandalous even though it fell within the ambit of legitimate presidential powers, and this case is scandalous as well. Whether it’s more corrupt to help a relative than a party donor or donor’s spouse is an interesting subject for debate about the nature of political ethics, but I don’t think we need to resolve that question. We can just say that (1) past presidents have used the pardon power in legal but disreputable ways and (2) pardoning your son is also quite disreputable even if it is constitutional as well.

Read the rest here.

Something that struck me as I was reading this, was the realization that Hunter's troubles may not be over. If the GOP (soon to be in full control of the government) decides to hold more hearings on his activities he cannot refuse to testify. Having been granted a full pardon, he no longer can invoke the 5th amendment. Which means he can be grilled under oath about pretty much any subject since 2014 with no recourse. That could get very ugly, very fast.

Biden Pardons His Son

Yes, Trump has abused the power of the pardon, and is all but certain to do so again once he regains office. But that is neither here nor there. Biden's intervention on behalf of his son, after explicitly promising not to, was an outrageous act of personal and official corruption. The scandalous perversion of this constitutional prerogative by two successive presidents from different parties further suggests we may be entering a period where the traditional norms and guardrails that have kept presidents from flagrantly misusing their powers might be crumbling. Making matters worse, Mr. Trump has already made it crystal clear he intends to use that power to shield his allies and followers from criminal prosecution, including those who at Trump's instigation attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. How will Democrats be able to criticize such abuses when their own leader is as guilty? 

Ross Douthat: The Biden Scandal has not gone away

One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is, when there was a push to force an aging president toward the exits: Then and only then we got a drip-drip-drip of fascinating inside information.

For instance, we learned that Biden hadn’t held a full cabinet meeting since last October and that his handlers expected scripted questions from his cabinet officials. We learned that his capacities peak between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and diminish outside that six-hour window. We learned that congressional Democrats, liberal donors and some journalists all had exposure to Biden’s decline that they didn’t discuss publicly until the debacle of the June debate. We learned that none other than Hunter Biden was acting as a close adviser to his father in the crucial days after that debate.

We even learned that from early in his presidency, the first lady’s closest aides worked to shield her husband from the staff that serves the first family in its living quarters, even as the aides themselves were given unusual access to the residence — as though it were essential to create a cocoon of loyalty and silence around the nation’s chief executive even when he isn’t on the job.

These are all interesting and pertinent facts about the man who officially leads the United States in a time of global danger — and they have not ceased to be pertinent because that president is no longer running for re-election.

For a few weeks the media coverage of the Biden White House built up the idea that there was a major scandal here, implicating the inner circle that encouraged the president to run for re-election and practiced deception amid his obvious decline.

Read the rest here.

Biden bows out

I don't think anyone needed a crystal ball to see that this was all but inevitable. On a human level I feel kinda bad for the man. But political parties exist to win elections. And politics broadly speaking is a full contact sport. If you can't take the hits you should stick to golf. 

I can so picture Nancy Pelosi channeling the Godfather when deciding that Biden had to go. "It's not personal Joe; it's strictly business."

Some really bad numbers for Biden

There has been much talk lately about Biden's sinking poll numbers since the debate. Generally speaking, Democrats seem to already be conceding they are likely to lose the election with Biden at the top of the ticket. Republicans are publicly very confident. Privately, some are predicting a near landslide in electoral votes and have quietly begun vying for cabinet posts in the next administration. The recent attempt on Mr. Trump's life seems likely to add fuel to Trump's post-debate surge (or perhaps more accurately, Biden's collapse). 

Perusing the various statistics out there, I started looking at the states everybody is ignoring because they are never in play. (You would be correct; I have no life) And what I found in one really jarred me. 

Some states are so obvious that they don't generate a lot of polling. One of them is New York. The Empire State has not voted Republican since 1984, the year I cast my first vote for Ronald Reagan. Democrats in New York enjoy a roughly 2:1 advantage in voter registration over Republicans, who represent less than 30% of registered voters overall. To give you some perspective, Republicans have a slightly higher percentage of voters in California. New York is the definition of a one-party state with every branch of government and all statewide elected offices controlled by Democrats. 

As of this post, the last two state specific polls conducted in New York were done back in May and June, before Biden's debate meltdown. Those polls gave Biden a lead of 7 and 8% respectively. That averages out to 7.5%.

That is nuts.

In any state other than New York, that would be close enough to move the state from "safe Democrat," to "leans Democrat." But this is still New York, and no, it is not in play. There are enough people in that state who would vote for a cadaver in advanced state of decomposition over Donald Trump to keep it firmly in the Democratic column. 

But Biden should be polling a solid double digit lead there. The fact that even before the debate, his lead was only in the single digits in a state as blue as New York should be a flashing red alert for Democrats (and anti-Trumpers of every persuasion). To my mind, this is a very clear signal that Democrats may be heading for an election wipe out. 

Carl Bernstein: Biden's debate melt down was not a "one off"

Journalist Carl Bernstein is calling President Biden’s debate performance against former President Trump last week a “horror show” and said his sources close to the commander in chief say what happened is not a one-time problem.

Bernstein said he’s been talking to several sources who are near Biden, those who love him, support him and raised money for his reelection, but they are “adamant that what we saw the other night, the Joe Biden we saw, is not a one-off.”

“There have been 15 to 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the President has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed,” Bernstein told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday evening. “And what’s so significant is that the people that this is coming from, and also how many people around the president are aware of such incidents.”

Read the rest here.

This can't go on. For the sake of the country, the president needs to stand aside and end his ill-considered bid for reelection. The decline in the president's health is clearly serious and likely to accelerate. Setting aside the obvious fact that he is unlikely to be able to defeat Donald Trump, which would be catastrophic, Mr. Biden is simply unfit to be president for another four years. The frantic denials from the White House are reminding me of 1944 when those around FDR knew he was gravely ill and went to great lengths to cover it up. In the increasingly improbable event that Biden is reelected, we should all understand that the next president is almost certain to be Kamala Harris. 

The New York Times calls on Biden to end his bid for re-election

To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race

The Debate: And the winner was...

Dean Phillips

CNN Poll Gives Trump Wide Lead Over Biden

In a two-way race Trump leads by 6%. In a five-way race including RFK Jr and the two far left candidates, Trump leads by 9%. If this poll holds up and is anywhere near accurate on election day, Trump could win an electoral blowout the likes of which we haven't seen since the 1980s. 

Caveat: Right now, the poll is an outlier. It is wildly inconsistent with virtually all recent polling data. So, we will need to see if this a bad poll or if it is the first sign of a major Trump surge. Until things become clearer, team Biden is probably not going to be sleeping well. 

Latest Polls: Election is a toss up

An averaging of recent national polls show President Biden has significantly reduced Donald Trump's once formidable lead in the polls to a de facto draw. Real Clear Politics average of polls from the last few weeks show Trump's lead has narrowed to .02 percent in a straight match up between him and Biden. That is a statistical tie. In a five way race with RFK Jr and the two far left independents thrown in, Trump holds a 2 point advantage. However, that is well within the customary margin of error. And with most polls showing around 8% of voters undecided, the election is currently wide open. One point on which Americans are in overwhelming agreement is their dislike of both Trump and Biden, with a super majority of voters expressing deep dissatisfaction with the choice between the two men. Thus far however, this has not translated into any serious support for the third party candidates. All of whom collectively are polling only in the low single digits. (Kennedy's polling numbers have recently fallen off a cliff.) It seems increasingly likely that the election will be decided by uncommitted independents and political moderates.

Recent polling data can be found here. 

NY Times /Siena poll gives Trump 5pt lead

President Biden is struggling to overcome doubts about his leadership inside his own party and broad dissatisfaction over the nation’s direction, leaving him trailing behind Donald J. Trump just as their general-election contest is about to begin, a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College has found.

With eight months left until the November election, Mr. Biden’s 43 percent support lags behind Mr. Trump’s 48 percent in the national survey of registered voters.

Only one in four voters think the country is moving in the right direction. More than twice as many voters believe Mr. Biden’s policies have personally hurt them as believe his policies have helped them. A majority of voters think the economy is in poor condition. And the share of voters who strongly disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of his job has reached 47 percent, higher than in Times/Siena polls at any point in his presidency.

Read the rest here.

Michigan Fires a Warning Shot Across Biden's Bow

LANSING, Michigan (AP) — “Uncommitted” got enough votes to win two delegates in Michigan’s Democratic primary on Tuesday, as an effort organized to protest President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza made its voice heard in the key swing state.

While Biden won the state with more than 618,000 votes, more than 100,000 Michigan Democratic primary voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” in the race, enough to pick up the pair of delegates — one from the 6th District, centered around Ann Arbor, and the other from the 12th District, which includes Detroit suburbs with large blocs of Arab Americans.

The vote totals raise concerns for Democrats in a state Biden won by only 154,000 votes in 2020. Biden was beaten by the “uncommitted” vote in both Dearborn and Hamtramck, where Arab Americans make up close to half the population.

Read the rest here. 

Biden attacked Hur for asking him when his son died. But did it happen?

President Joe Biden lashed out at Robert Hur last week over one particular line in the special counsel's report on his handling of classified documents: that Biden "did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died."

“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden told reporters in an impromptu White House press conference. “Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”

But Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.

Biden raised his son’s death after being asked about his workflow at a Virginia rental home from 2016 to 2018, the sources said, when a ghost writer was helping him write a memoir about losing Beau to brain cancer in 2015. Investigators had a 2017 recording showing that Biden had told the ghost writer he had found “classified stuff” in that home, the report says.

Biden began trying to recall that period by discussing what else was happening in his life, and it was at that point in the interview that he appeared confused about when Beau had died, the sources said. Biden got the date—May 30—correct, but not the year.

Hur's 345-page report absolved Biden of criminal wrongdoing while pointing to evidence that he took home and kept highly classified material. Even though Biden was found to have disclosed classified information to the ghost writer on three occasions, prosecutors concluded that they could not prove that the president knew it was classified information at the time.

Read the rest here.

This is going to be quite simply the most awful election year of my life, and one of the worst in the history of the country.