Bulwark Takes - Joe Biden Diagnosed With “Aggressive Form” of Cancer

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger react to the news of former President Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis, and reflect on his personal and political legacy.

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Total savings varies based on purchase amount. See Lowe's.com for details. Hey, guys. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at The Borg, and I am joined by Andrew Egger, who is the author of Morning Shots. We're coming to you on Sunday afternoon. Andrew, for some reason, is in the office, but that's just because he's diligent. We're going to be talking about pretty somber news that passed the transit today. Ex-president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with

cancer. This was the statement from his press person. Quote, last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer characterized by a Gleason score of nine, grade group five with metastasis to the bone. While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone sensitive, which allows for effective management. The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians. So, I mean, obviously this is fairly saddening news for the ex-president and the people who love him. It's unavoidably coming amid a very difficult stretch for him about

his presidency and whether he was fit for service during it. And I'm not totally sure, honestly, how this or if this should affect that conversation. But I have a couple thoughts. The first, and Andrew, you can jump in whenever you want, is that, you know, you feel for the guy on a human level, put aside the politics. And obviously, that's totally separate. And I think ripe for criticism, of course, but it's a tragic thing to happen, especially for someone whose family has been snake bitten by cancer the way his has. Two is, and I think this does relate to the conversation we were having prior to this announcement about his frailty, his ability to serve, is that we're not at a place, I think, where we're totally comfortable reporting on or talking about age and how it impacts politics.

And I know it feels like we are because we've been talking about it for months now. But I think, if anything, the publication of this book, Original Sin, this diagnosis and a whole host of other things shows that we're just a little bit, we still treat it a little bit taboo, I think. And it's uncomfortable for us to outwardly address it. And I understand why, but it's something that I think we need to get over and talk more frankly about. Anyways, those are my two initial thoughts. I know this is a tricky subject. And so I appreciate people understanding that maybe I haven't, maybe it's not totally fleshed out and maybe you're going to be upset with something we say, but we're just trying to handle it in real time. Uh, Andrew, what did you, what do you make of

just the succession of news here? Um, for Joe Biden, obviously tragic. Yeah. Just, so I guess just a few things. I mean, one, I mean, it's, it's a little hard for us to talk about because we are obviously political reporters. You know, we know as much about kind of the ins and outs of the health diagnosis as anybody does, as any other layman, like relative Bozo on the subject does. I think that, I mean, obviously it's difficult news. I guess the small mercy here is that he is getting this news and we're getting this news in his post-presidency. I mean, it would be a much more fraught thing if this had happened a year ago. Imagine just in addition to all of the personal difficulty here and all the familial pain and all those sorts of things, having to juggle all of this in addition to the, just the burden of having to run the country, which I mean, it's just kind of like a common

place to talk about how, how much that burden puts pressure on a person, how much it ages a person throughout, throughout their term. And so, so that's, that's one, you know, just to pick on that. It's like, we've had presidents who have served in incredible distress before like woodrow wilson kennedy uh was serving with incredible distress uh nixon was beset by demons and potentially alcoholism right like so it's not that this is totally abnormal but there's something it feels oddly different uh in a way now i agree with you. Thank God he wasn't in office when this happened. But this is the whole thing about being the oldest president ever or in a long time. The baseline of vigor and even all things going quite well, it was kind of a roll of the dice on

any given day, like how kind of up to it he was going to be. And, and obviously this, you know, just dramatically complicates that in a way that, that, that would not have necessarily afflicted those other presidents. Well, I mean, this clearly makes, obviously brings home the point that he should never have announced he was running for a second term. I mean, that's, I, I mean, I'm not trying to be crude about it, but everything that's been reported this past couple of weeks, the release of the Robert Herr audio, even the testimonials of Democrats who now are sort of open to the reckoning that they got it completely wrong, it all points in the same direction, which is he should have taken a one-term pledge,

should have never had said, I was going to run again, and should have recognized that at 80 years old, you're at a heightened risk for things like this to happen. You're rolling the dice. Yeah. And hopefully, at the very least, we can finally put to bed the ridiculous exercise of any time the former president is in an interview or whatever, kind of having him go through that gauntlet of like, well, should you have dropped out? Should you have run again? Making him trot out that answer of, oh, I think I could have won if I'd run again. I mean, just that whole horrible – like at no point was that a useful exercise for anything because what's the guy supposed to say?

Yeah, he was never going to say, yeah, I shouldn't have run. No, I mean he played the game and, and frankly, you know, that was deceitful, right? Like, I think he should have been more honest about his frailties and certainly the people around him should have been, I, I do, I do agree with that. Yeah. I, I, I just go around and around on that because on the one hand, yes, obviously, I mean, like, like obviously it is the case that he hung on way too long and that especially

the people around him were, were like actively covering for him and in various ways. And yet it's, it is the case that he hung on way too long and that especially the people around him were like actively covering for him in various ways. And yet it's very difficult, I mean, to put yourself in his shoes and to say, I mean, like any aging professional who's like losing their fastball where they're just like, no, I still got it in me. I can still do it. I'm still there. So that's where, yes. But that's where I get back to this whole thing of like, it's taboo, right? Like Steve scale, longtime Biden advisor ran super PAC for him, never worked in the white house, but was one of the bigger online fans and fans period.

He wrote a piece for us where he's like, you know, I think the crux of one of the parts is like, they failed to recognize that they would have been, um, rewarded. Um, had they just acknowledged the frailty. I mean, they were very afraid of being like, no, he can't, he's not going to serve a second term. This is just a transition presidency for real. And Steve writes that, in fact, had he done that, had he been open about, look, I probably could give it a go, but I'm going to be like responsible. And

you know, I'm old and you deserve someone younger. Steve's point is that had he done lines like that, had he made that his posture, that he would have been rewarded for the public for his honesty. And they would have been, they would have rallied to his side. And I mean, you talk about a sports analogy, but I do think there's something to it. It's like, you know, when it seems like it's like the aging athletes last season and they've announced that they're going to retire, like there is some sort of camaraderie that is felt. There is a nostalgia that almost kicks in. So I don't know. Who knows if it translates in politics, but you don't really have that much in politics because people just feel like they are important, too important to, to, to retire. Yeah. And it was just difficult as well, because I mean, imagine if it had been

the other way around. Imagine if like, if, if the, the cancer diagnosis that we, that we got the news of today, if that had come a year and a half ago or two years ago, and it was only just now that like the, the obvious kind of like, uh, aging was catching up to him mentally. And in terms of his stamina and all that, I mean, I, I think it's hard to do a counterfactual, but, but I think you might've seen a different story. I mean, like if, if the president had publicly been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, that's the kind of thing people kind of wrap their heads around. Whereas, you know, one of the problems with, with the kind of aging and the, and the gradual

slipping and, and, and all of that, that, that we kind of all saw over the last year is that's the kind of thing that it's so easy for everyone to kind of live in denial about, right? I mean, and especially the person who's involved. The other thing about that though, and which kind of has tripped me up a little bit is like, in a way you can say, okay, maybe he is physically not where he ever was and is slipping badly, but so long as he's mentally there, right? Like that's what counts, right?

Like, and so for a little while, and you know, I'm just dipping back into my time editing the white house beat around this for a little while, like the stories were around sort of the physical stuff, right? It was like,

Oh, he needs the shorter staircase. He's wearing these different sneakers. He's, you know, not really, you know, not really, you know, doing three or four nights in a row overseas. He's ducking out on the last night. Like he's tired more like, and that's bad. Obviously it's not great. Um, but you can sort

of put that into a different bucket than the mental stuff. The mental stuff was always harder for us to kind of cover because, you know, you'd slippages on in interviews and you'd have gas and of course that was like you would write about it but there was it didn't never felt like we could i don't know i didn't i don't want to say never felt but it was hard to come to some sort of consensus opinion about where he was on a mental scale yeah up until the debate debate yeah and then it became very obvious i mean there were certainly signs and we wrote about them but it just those two buckets were always hard to kind of make put together does that i don't know if that makes sense yeah no absolutely and the other

the other element of it is just you know seeing the whole kind of like political apparatus around him kind of like helping him message himself and and kind of like yeah and that certainly felt that certainly felt mental but there's also like well maybe he's just tired i don't know right and and and just the fact that that's always happening for the president of the united states right i mean there's there's always that trump well i mean totally with donald trump he'll say something insane and the and the people will come around and kind of like massage it back in the direction of policy or whatever and. And that's the kind of stuff we don't need to endlessly relitigate, you know, the move of last year. I guess the one thing, I mean, I hate even talking this much about politics

for the whole thing, because really it's a personal story about him. But I guess the one other political thing that we need to say in the context of all of this is like going forward. Well, I guess two things I would say. One thing about the kind of horrible, nitty gritty politics stuff that we have to talk about, which is that it just kind of underscores again the difficulty that Kamala Harris has now, like in terms of her political future, just because she more than anybody else

was like in the room working with him, like in a personal position to kind of stick up for him and his acuity and his readiness and all these sorts of things. And on the one hand, it's like, what's she supposed to say? She's not going to go out and sandbag her boss in real time. On the other hand, it's hard for her to come out and explain why all through that period she, along with the rest of the apparatus, was saying, no, he's there. He's got it all going. And I mean, like, you know, if it hadn't been for that debate in the world that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and I guess all of us would have rather had than the world that we'd be in right, than the world that we're in right now, in our ideal world, you know, going back a year ago, this would be

nation shaking news, right? Because Joe Biden would be the president again, and we'd be dealing with all this. Like I say, in our ideal world. Our ideal. Well, look, yeah. No, I hear you. Again, I go back to what you just said, which is like, was Harris supposed to just sandbag her boss?

It's a no-win situation. It's hard. It's hard. It's a no-win situation, but that hard. It's a no-win situation, but that doesn't mean it's not going to stick around. No, it should. Of course. And that's the price you pay, is that you took that path,

and now you have to answer questions for it. Can I just say one other thing on politics of this, which is just the thing that I keep coming back to when I think about this. And again, we don't really know fully what the deal is with this cancer. We know it's quite bad. It's, you know, prostate cancer kills a lot. He's 82 years old. He's got prostate cancer. They didn't say treatment. They said, they didn't say treatment. They said management. You know, people live with prostate cancer. They can live for years managing prostate cancer,

but at his age, um, you know, it's, it's not a great diagnosis. Without getting into like prognosticating about all of that, like the thing that I keep coming back to is just the tragic fact that Biden is likely not going to live to kind of know what his legacy is, right? I mean, like right now, you can tell that it's just eating, like the fact that is eating him is the end of his presidency. It's the fact that he kind of crash landed out and Donald Trump went back in and the endless relitigation in the press and all these books coming out. I mean, like that, that is the only fact of his presidency as far as like the current political moment is concerned. And, and he might not get to see what comes after that and what comes after that. We don't know what

his ultimate legacy will be because we don't know how this story ends in the short term. Obviously, if Donald Trump totally crashes the United States, basically out of circulation as the power it's been, then Joe Biden's legacy is enabling that to happen. If we kind of get back on the rails and there's life after all of this in a way that we all like and appreciate, then maybe Biden's ultimate legacy is a lot of the good work that he got done while he was president, you know, and, and nobody gets to know what that is now. And it's, it is a tragedy that, that, you know, this is the moment that Biden is, is

enduring as he's enduring all these other things. And, uh, and, and we don't know, you know, whether he'll be around to, to ultimately see how history judges him. I mean, nobody gets to ultimately see how history judges them, I guess. But that's just kind of the tragedy of it all that's kind of going around my head right now. You know what? That's a good place to end it on. Not much to add to that.

Andrew Egger, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it. To the viewers, I appreciate your understanding of this very delicate conversation. We thought it was important enough that we should hop on and quickly discuss it with you all.