Former Democrat presidential candidate Dean Phillips said Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis was released to deflect negative reports about his White House term.
Biden’s office announced Sunday that the former president had been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer. The news came after news stories and books in recent weeks focused on how Democrats and the mainstream media ignored Biden’s physical limitations and declining mental acuity during his presidency.
Phillips, a former Minnesota congressman who challenged Biden for the Democratic Party’s 2024 nomination, said the timing of the cancer announcement was not an accident.
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that this was announced this week,” Phillips said, The New York Times reported Monday. “It’s hard to comport otherwise.”
Phillips then compared Biden to President Donald Trump in a way other Democrats, especially those obsessed with undermining the current president, can understand.
“Donald Trump isn’t shy about his corruption,” Phillips said. “What’s so troubling is that what the people around Joe Biden clearly were doing was in some ways more egregious.”
Phillips ended his long-shot 2024 Democratic presidential bid in early March last year after failing to win a primary contest against Biden.
A month earlier, Phillips said special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the president’s mishandling of classified materials “all but handed the 2024 election to Donald Trump.”
The 388-page report described Biden as an “elderly man” with “diminished faculties.” Phillips said it confirms that he is unfit to serve another term in the White House.
The Hur report again was in the news during the weekend after Axios on Friday first reported that audio of Biden’s October 2023 interviews with Hur included the president’s memory lapses and appeared to validate Hur’s assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Prostate cancers are given a score called a Gleason score that measures, on a scale of 1 to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was 9, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive.
Since the announcement of Biden’s cancer, medical experts have said the seriousness of the diagnosis must have been known well before the former president left office in January.
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