Biden Now Says a Man of 80 With Cancer Shouldn't Run. The Hard Questions Start There.

Former President Joe Biden says he did not know he had cancer while he was in the White House, and that he would not have sought a second term in 2024 if he had already been diagnosed, according to an interview with People magazine reported by the Associated Press.

The remarks, released Wednesday, come days before the publication of his memoir and a week after Democrats swept to victory in the midterm elections; Politico reported that the interview was recorded the week before its release, after those wins. Biden, who turns 84 on Nov. 20, was 81 at the time of his June 2024 debate against Donald Trump.

"If I had known that I was feeling lousy because I had cancer," Biden told People, he would not have gone forward with his campaign, the AP reported. He added that he does not think a man of 80 with cancer should be running for president, while insisting that age alone was not disqualifying and that he had been the best-equipped person for the job.

Biden was far less willing to concede ground on the night that ended his campaign. Politico reported that he described his debate performance as not very consequential, and The Independent reported he said the debate did not disturb him because it was not consequential. He said he had expected a second debate that never took place. Within weeks of that June night he withdrew from the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost to Trump in November.

His son Hunter Biden has blamed the cancer for the poor performance, Politico reported. The former president told People he still has all his faculties, and he again defended his decision to pardon Hunter, saying Trump goes after people without any basis, the AP reported.

The interview previews "Promise Me, America," Biden's account of his four years in office, published by Little, Brown and Company. The AP reported in July that the book would come out after the midterm elections, and the latest AP report says it arrives next Tuesday. It is the same book that, as we reported earlier, reprints the gracious letter Trump left for Biden in the Oval Office in January 2021.

Biden's diagnosis came months after he left office in 2025: an aggressive, metastatic prostate cancer, The Independent reported. Politico reported that Trump questioned the delay in detecting it, pointing to the high-grade Gleason score of 9 that was disclosed at the time.

Politico also reported that Biden had not been screened for prostate cancer since 2014, which is consistent with U.S. guidelines that advise against routine screening for men in their 70s. That fact cuts both ways. It may explain how the disease went unnoticed, but it also means that no one can say with certainty how long it had been growing. Biden's published physical exams as president never stated whether he had received a PSA blood test, according to WJLA. Oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel was blunt in his assessment to the outlet: "He had it while he was president". When the diagnosis was announced in May 2025, Trump said publicly that someone needed to talk to Biden's doctor, WJLA reported.

None of that proves that Biden or his physicians knew about the cancer while he was in office, and no evidence has been reported that they did. But it does show how little the public was told about the health of a man asking for a second term that would have ended when he was 86.

Here is what Biden's new account concedes, whether he intends it to or not: there were moments in office when he felt unwell, and he now believes the country was entitled to a candidate who was not facing a serious illness. That was the core of what millions of Americans, and many reporters who were dismissed at the time, were saying in the summer of 2024.

It also raises questions his interview does not answer. If Biden was feeling lousy, who around him noticed, and what did they do about it? Why did the White House medical team release physicals that left out basic screening information? And if the debate was not consequential, why did the Democratic Party force its sitting president out of the race within a month?

Congressional investigators have already tried to answer some of those questions. In October 2025, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee released a report on Biden's decline and his aides' use of the autopen, built on interviews with 14 witnesses. The majority staff concluded that aides had "abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy," and the report declared void any autopen actions that lacked documented written approval from the president. It asked the Justice Department to investigate two longtime senior aides, Anthony Bernal and Annie Tomasini, and asked the District of Columbia's medical board to review the conduct of Biden's physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor. The report also said that then-chief of staff Jeff Zients approved the use of the autopen for the sweeping pardons issued on Jan. 19, 2025, from his home.

Those findings came from the committee's Republican majority, and they are not the final word. Still, the questions it raised about who was making decisions, and how much the president himself was involved, are exactly the kind of questions his new book should answer if he wants history to judge him fairly.

Biden's defenders have long argued that he served capably and that age is not the same as incapacity, a point he made again this week. That is a fair argument to have on the record. But a president's health is not a private matter when he holds the nuclear codes and asks the country for four more years. The voters who were told everything was fine deserved the whole truth.

Democrats return to power in Congress in January, and the party is already looking ahead to 2028. The lesson of 2024 should not be lost on either side: candidates and their staffs owe the public honesty about fitness for office, and the press owes the public the persistence to ask, even when the answers are unwelcome.

There is also a human side to this story that deserves acknowledgment. Biden is fighting a serious illness in his eighties, and Americans of every political stripe can pray for his health and comfort while still insisting on a full accounting of the decisions made in his name.

"Promise Me, America" goes on sale next Tuesday, and Biden's own telling of the debate, his withdrawal and his final months in office will soon be on the record. Readers should measure it against the Oversight Committee's findings and the testimony of those who worked closest to him. The question that matters most is not whether Biden would have run had he known about his cancer. It is whether the people around him knew, or should have known, that he was not up to the job, and chose to keep that from the country.