The Biden cover-up and a credibility crisis that threatens democracy
Understanding how both the White House and much of the corporate media were complicit in concealing the president’s condition involves more than saving reputations.
By Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS
May 21, 2025
The news that a former president has been diagnosed with what appears to be a fatal illness ought to be the sort of thing that would lead to a genuine truce in the political warfare over any leader’s legacy. But the announcement that former President Joe Biden is suffering from what is described as an aggressive form of prostate cancer has done just the opposite. Far from quieting the discussion about his presidency and his obvious declining mental capacity while in office, it has only added to the furor over the cover-up of his condition on the part of the White House and the media that prevented the public from knowing the truth.
Biden’s supporters, as well as those Democrats who would like the public’s complete focus to be on what they claim are the shortcomings of President Donald Trump, are arguing that his illness ought to quiet questions about what was really going on in the White House during Biden’s four years in office. Scrutiny of the current administration, of course, should not be lessened by the continued discussion about its predecessor. But the idea that litigating the issues about how and why the Biden White House was able to get away with concealing the former president’s ailments amounts to pointless recriminations is wrong.
If, as it appears almost certainly true, the facts about a serving president’s declining health—both mental and physical—were kept from the public, it raises a host of serious questions.
A conspiracy to deceive the public
First of all, it involves not only those surrounding Biden’s disastrous decision to run for re-election and, at least from the point of view of angry Democrats, how this aided Trump’s effort to return to the White House. Nor is it limited to the way that his family—particularly his wife, Jill Biden—and his staff conspired to keep the facts about him hidden from the public. It also calls into question the way most of the mainstream media went along with what can only be described as a conspiracy to deceive the voters about the choices they were being offered in 2024.
That means that what we’re actually discussing is not just a post-mortem about the outcome of the election but a full-blown credibility crisis involving both the government and the press. This is especially troubling because those entities that have spent the past few years trying to convince Americans that their democracy was in danger from Trump were themselves subverting it in a manner that is far more egregious than any misdeeds on his part.
Integral to the debate about the supposed threat to democracy was the claim that the growing polarization and distrust of established institutions was being fueled by misinformation spewed out by partisans. But talk of Trump’s “post-truth” presidency falls flat if those who claimed to be defending democracy against him were also lying to the American people about something as basic as whether the man supposedly running the country was unfit for office. That is only made worse if, as the cancer diagnosis makes plain, Biden was suffering from an illness that he must have had for years and might very well have killed him in office had he won a second term.
Not only do Americans have a right to ask who was truly in charge during much of the Biden administration. They also need to know why it was that most of the journalists covering the White House during his four years in office were so remarkably incurious about his obvious decline and often quick to damn those inquiring about it as not only inappropriate but dealing in misinformation.
The motivation for this cover-up is as obvious as were the president’s problems. His supporters feared that revealing his incapacity would help Trump and the Republicans.
Under the circumstances, it’s clear that you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to conclude that the news coverage from the legacy media that were part of this charade can no longer be trusted. That applies not merely to what they said about Biden but extends to their coverage of Trump. This includes issues like the current war Israel is waging against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists who led the murderous assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Simply put, if a press corps was willing to lie about Biden to influence an election, there’s no reason to doubt that many of the same people are willing to misreport or ignore evidence to support false charges of war crimes or genocide against the Jewish state. That not only buttresses the campaign to isolate Israel but also fuels the surge of antisemitism that has spread across the globe since Oct. 7.
Behind-the-scenes reporting
The democratic system simply can’t function properly if people are convinced that their government lies and that the press, which is supposed to provide accountability, won’t do so if it hurts their favored party and candidates.
The story of Biden’s health was already back in the news when his cancer diagnosis became public. That was because of the publication of a new book by CNN host Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson titled, Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.
The work is a behind-the-scenes view of the White House’s desperate efforts in the last year of the Biden presidency to prevent the truth about Biden’s cognitive abilities from getting out. Its primary focus is on the “sins” of the Biden family, White House staff and prominent Democrats in keeping the story off the front pages. While it contains accounts of a great many interesting examples of how the ploy worked, two basic problems remain.
One is the assumption that the president’s condition was a secret until his disastrous performance in the presidential debate with Trump on June 27, 2024. To the contrary, Biden’s critics had been discussing his problems for years. Family and staff limited his working hours and kept him from conducting interviews with the press. But the abundant video evidence of his growing confusion was always in the public domain and constantly posted on social media by his opponents.
The other is that while Tapper and Thompson acknowledge that the White House press corps failed to get to the bottom of a story that was right in front of their noses, their complicity goes farther than that.
Media complicity
The book’s publisher has assembled a video montage of clips in which Tapper and Thompson provided more scrutiny of the issue than most other reporters. But it’s equally true that Tapper himself repeatedly denounced those asking questions about Biden’s health, including a deprecating Wall Street Journal editorial on the subject and cutting off an interview with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, when she raised the issue. He later apologized for that, but only after the 2024 election. Tapper is an insufferable hypocrite who deserves none of the credit he wants for exposing a scandal in which he was also complicit.
Most Washington journalists were even more guilty of involvement in hiding Biden’s disabilities in plain sight. They actively cooperated with the White House’s operation to keep the president’s cognitive decline out of their coverage. As the book relates, the White House sometimes successfully pressured reporters not to write stories on the subject. It also involved prominent media personalities who willingly echoed the White House’s deceptions.
For example, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough flat-out lied when he claimed that Biden was “better than he’s ever been, intellectually, analytically. … This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever.” Others did, too. CNN media reporter Brian Stelter told his audience not to believe their eyes when presented with videos of Biden’s problems, falsely calling them “cheap fakes.”
Seen from that point of view, Tapper and Thompson’s book seems more like an effort to put all of the blame on the Biden White House and exonerate the press.
Tapper and Thompson focus on how the cover-up enabled Biden’s decision to run and helped lead to the Democrats’ defeat. In doing so, they underestimate the intelligence of the voting public since Trump voters figured out that the White House and the liberal press were trying to deceive them. The only people who were really deceived were those most likely to vote for Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris, who ultimately replaced him on the Democratic ticket. Those who only read, listened and watched liberal media were not only treated with contempt by those they trusted—they also turned out to be the most ill-informed about the president’s condition and so much else.
This should also put the ongoing discussion about threats to democracy in perspective. In both the United States and Israel, it has become a major partisan talking point for opponents of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Many of the same outlets who were complicit in the cover-up of Biden’s condition were also enthusiastic supporters of banana republic-style lawfare aimed at imprisoning his chief opponent and his administration’s collusion with Internet oligarchs to silence dissent on Covid-19 policies and other issues. When the allegations against Trump are juxtaposed against the real life anti-democratic conspiracy concerning Biden that played out in public view, the charges of authoritarianism must be seen as politically motivated disinformation.
Integral to the narrative about the alleged plot against democracy is the notion that the Internet has given free rein to unreliable sources that spew out lies and conspiracy theories that undermine faith in institutions that should be trusted. Some of what can be found on the web and social media platforms is untrue. Yet as acknowledgement of Biden’s incapacity for much of his time in the White House becomes widely understood, it’s obvious that legacy media is simply too partisan and biased to be trusted to act as the gatekeepers or arbiters of accuracy.
The damage that their cynical disregard for the truth has already done can’t be overestimated. It also explains the willingness of many of the same outlets to act as Hamas’s stenographers when it comes to the war on Israel, in which a new generation of younger left-wing journalists is as invested as the effort to prevent Trump’s election.
It’s now clear that the main threat to a functioning democracy is not coming from Trump so much as it is from those who think that there are no limits as to what can be done to defeat him. A country with a media establishment that regards loyalty to the credentialed elites who revile Trump and his working-class voters as more important than telling the truth is in deep trouble. This highlights a desperate need for alternative outlets free of establishment biases. Yet until mainstream journalism starts holding itself accountable for its failures to report the truth about an incapacitated president, the public is right to ignore it and to, instead, seek the facts elsewhere.
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