Over the past few days, the health of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has been called into focus with the disclosure that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer.At the same time, Democrats are undertaking a painful re-examination of what went wrong with Joe Biden’s campaign for re-election, and the Trump White House has released embarrassing audio of Biden being interviewed.The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Reid J. Epstein, Lisa Lerer and Tyler Pager sit down to make sense of it all. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What health concerns are being discussed about Joe Biden?
So it's just amazing how much that Joe Biden has been in the news over the last few days for all the wrong reasons. For the past few days. Damaging new details tonight about former President Biden. A new book alleges serious concerns about his mental acuity. It was, quote, obvious to many at a fundraiser last summer that then-President Biden did not know who George Clooney was.
They basically were terrified that Biden was going to have to be in a wheelchair before the election.
spurred on by two new books. Titled Original Sin, President Biden's Decline, its cover-up, and his disastrous choice to run again.
Three reporters wrote this book. It's called 2024, How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America.
Democrats began to undertake a painful reexamination of what went wrong with Joe Biden's presidency and his campaign for reelection.
The Democratic Party needs to be honest. It's painfully obvious President Biden should not have run.
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Chapter 2: How are Democrats reevaluating Biden's campaign?
And the Trump White House eagerly added fuel to the fire by releasing embarrassing audio of Biden being interviewed by a government lawyer.
In that audio tape, you hear President Biden rambling, unable to keep a train of thought, getting dates wrong.
This is adding even more fodder to accusations of a wide-ranging cover-up involving Biden's inner circle, Democrats and the world media.
Amid that reckoning, Biden himself has disclosed that he's been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.
Chapter 3: What was revealed about Biden's health diagnosis?
On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer characterized by a Gleason score of nine with metastasis to the bone.
Biden and his family are now reviewing his treatment options.
Today, we try to make sense of all of that and what it means for the future of the Democratic Party with three of my colleagues, Tyler Pager, Lisa Lair, and Reid Epstein. It's Tuesday, May 20th. Let us get started. Tyler, Lisa, and Reid, thank you for making time for us. Appreciate it.
It's good to see you, Michael. Welcome, Tyler, to The Daily.
Long-time fan, first-time participant. I'm thrilled to be here. As we're hinting at, Lisa and Reid are veterans of this format, and Tyler, you are the new face in The Daily Universe, and in particular, the Roundtable format. You came to us very recently from The Washington Post, where we all read your work with admiration and at times with deep envy. So welcome aboard.
Thanks so much for having me.
So totally, I suspect we're going to be radically changing gears here. And that's because of the very serious news that we got within the last 48 hours or so about former President Biden. I wonder what all three of you were thinking when you learned that he has cancer and a very aggressive and serious form of it.
Well, look, of course, I thought that this is something that must be devastating for the former president, devastating for his family. This is a family that has gone through perhaps more than their share of health crises. But I must say that along with my sympathies, I was slightly taken aback when it became clear how far along the cancer was.
Given the resources that he has to doctors and health care that it wasn't caught earlier was a little bit surprising to me.
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Chapter 4: How did Biden's health affect his political standing?
has been having a conversation about Biden's health and what people knew about his health and what some of the people closest to him, both his aides and other elected officials who were close allies, kind of what they knew about how capable he was of performing the duties of the presidency and what the gap might have been between that reality and what people said to the public.
And so this is getting thrown on top of that conversation, almost like pouring gasoline on a fire. People still feel deep empathy for him and feel sad that he is going through this. But I think it's also fits in with the anger that a lot of Democrats have at former President Biden and the people closest to him who protected and abetted him throughout this process.
And I think an even more important dynamic here is almost since Biden won the presidency in 2020, Democratic voters have been saying again and again in every way they can in polling and interviews that they believed that Biden was too old and was unfit to hold the office.
And then here you are, four months after the man leaves office, he comes out with a public diagnosis of very serious cancer that would, in fact, make him fairly unfit to hold the office. And that whole time, while Democratic voters were saying this in polling and everywhere else, Democratic officials were insisting that he was fine.
So there's this dynamic in the party where voters, Democratic voters, feel misled by their own leaders. And now, in some ways, it appears that they are getting confirmation of their belief.
And that's a really difficult political dynamic for Democrats and one that it's really unclear how they will tackle and solve for in the coming years, especially now that it's a little bit harder to speak openly about the former president because there are such mixed feelings. People feel really badly that he's so ill.
I mean, many Democrats deeply love President Biden and respect the work he did as president. Right.
And Tyler, I want you to talk about some of the revelations that have come out in the past week or two that, as you said, Lisa, seem to, for many, confirm some of the worst fears about Biden's fitness for a second term. And as I said, Tyler, you helped write and report one of the books that brought forth some of these revelations. So you're now tasked with beginning to summarize them.
Yeah, there's a whole host of different types of revelations that fall into various buckets. One, you know, Michael, as you mentioned from the book that I co-wrote with former colleagues at The Washington Post, revealed that some of Biden's closest aides debated before his final physical as president whether they should have him submit for a cognitive test as part of his physical test.
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Chapter 5: What revelations have emerged about Biden's fitness for office?
Reid, whether or not this is a cover-up or strong-arming or some form of very willful ignorance, it's all the revelations and details we're talking about here, coming out over the past week or so, that lead several high-profile Democrats to start to talk more openly, largely because they're being asked by reporters, but they start to talk more openly about...
You know, we saw Pete Buttigieg made his return to sort of the political sphere. He did a town hall event in Iowa, of all places. And he did a town hall event in Iowa, of all places.
Would the party have been better off if he had just not run for reelection?
Maybe. He didn't quite go all the way. He took a baby step. And, you know, right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that's the case. And said maybe it would have been a good idea if Biden hadn't stayed in the race for so long and they had a primary. We saw Chris Murphy, the very ambitious senator from Connecticut.
Obviously, in retrospect, the president should have gotten out of the race earlier.
There's
Who made a personal vouching for Biden's mental fitness as late as, what, like February or March of last year.
You know, like anybody who reaches that stage in their life, you know, there is some level of diminishment.
Say that it was obvious that he suffered some sort of decline in his acuity.
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Chapter 6: Is there evidence of a cover-up regarding Biden's health?
We're seeing these differing ambitions sort of play out in the public stage.
Well, we're going to go to break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about, Lisa, what you just started to mention, which is the manner in which the Trump administration decided to try to put its thumb on the scale of this moment and all the questions around Biden's decision to run for a second term and his legacy, which is the audio that was leaked in the past couple of days.
We'll do that right after the break. Lisa, Reid, Tyler, welcome back. We had understood for quite some time that when President Biden sat down with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents after he left his role as vice president, that the interview did not go all that well.
We knew that because the special counsel wrote a report in which he said it did not go very well for Joe Biden. But Tyler, I want you to explain why we just heard this audio at all.
Yeah, so the interview occurred in 2023. And after that, in 2024, the special counsel released his report. And we got a full transcript of Biden's interview with the special counsel. And it spanned more than five hours. But the Biden administration fought Republican efforts to release the audio.
And so when Donald Trump was elected president, it was not a stretch to believe that the Trump administration would be willing to release the entire audio.
Is it clear that the Trump administration recognized that this was a moment that was fertile because of the books and the debate and the entire reexamination going on within the Democratic Party? Is that what happened here?
It's a great question. It's not a stretch to believe that in this current moment, when there's a lot of conversation about Joe Biden's mental acuity, that the Trump administration would capitalize on that.
And Lisa, you've actually listened, I believe, to the entire five hours of this recording. And I'm curious what your experience of it was.
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Chapter 7: What implications does Biden’s health have for the Democratic Party?
Thank you again for your time. We're very grateful. Appreciate it very much. All right. That's a lot of work. And Doug.
And I think one of the most remarkable things is what you hear when you talk to Biden's closest aides about that interview. I've done a lot of reporting about the Her investigation and that interview specifically. And in the aftermath, when I talked to some of Biden's closest aides who were either in the room or briefed on the conversation, they said the interview went fine.
They said it was Biden being Biden. Hmm. It's Biden telling stories, Biden zigging and zagging. And they thought it wasn't his best performance. There were some concerns they had about his inability to recall certain dates and specific events. But they really said that is just Joe Biden being Joe Biden, the sort of politician storyteller he's always been.
That's fascinating.
And in some ways, this is so deeply human, right? Like who among us have not watched an elderly parent or grandparent age? And you don't always see it while it's happening because you're spending so much time with them that you can't necessarily see the markers when they come.
And you do have to wonder whether these aides who were not only with Biden every single day, but some of these people had been with him for decades. These were his closest aides in confidence, and they were so loyal to him, just didn't see the signs of age in the same way that maybe people who weren't with him all the time did.
I want to just talk about how the Herr saga ends because I think it speaks to what you're all suggesting. Robert Herr finishes this interview and then writes a report in which he says, I believe that charges against Biden for the way he handled classified documents are in order, but that a jury wouldn't ever be willing to convict him because he seems like someone who's Not entirely with it.
I mean, that was the essence of what he concluded. And after that report came out, those around Biden attacked her. They said, you are a partisan. Some suggested he was basically a hack, that he bore ill will towards Biden.
And today, all these months later, it seems like that could in theory be part of an effort to hide something, to attack the messenger rather than grapple with the realities of what was happening in that room. But I hear you all saying that those who were doing that attacking against her might have believed that. that this was normal for Biden and that there was sort of nothing to see here.
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