Former President Donald Trump on Monday suggested, without evidence, that President Joe Biden’s recent cancer diagnosis may have been concealed from the public for some time.
“There are things going on that the public wasn’t informed, and I think somebody is going to have to speak to his doctor,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
On Sunday, Biden’s office revealed he was diagnosed Friday with aggressive Stage 4 prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. The diagnosis followed a May 9 hospital visit in Philadelphia after a doctor discovered a nodule on his prostate. Biden, 82, had earlier reported urinary symptoms.
The cancer has a Gleason score of 9, which measures cancer aggressiveness on a scale from 6 to 10. Trump appeared to confuse this with staging: “To get to Stage 9, that’s a long time,” he said. “You have to say, why did it take so long? It can take years to get to this level of danger. So it’s a — look, it’s a very, very sad situation, and I feel very badly about it, and I think people should try and find out what happened.”
Trump linked the diagnosis to earlier concerns over Biden’s health being hidden: “Why wasn’t the cognitive ability — why wasn’t that discussed?” he said. “I think the doctors said he’s just fine, and it’s turned out that’s not so. It’s very d+ngerous.”
Biden’s spokesman did not immediately comment.
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a breast oncologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “He had this for many years — maybe even a decade — growing there and spreading. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency.”
The CDC advises against routine prostate cancer screenings for men over 70, citing risks of false positives and overtreatment. Most prostate cancers are asymptomatic until found by a doctor, said Dr. Marc Garnick of Harvard.
“It still happens on a regular basis,” Garnick noted.
Dr. Judd Moul of Duke University added, “Everyone’s talking about conspiracy and coverups,” but Biden’s diagnosis timeline is “perfectly reasonable and not medically unusual.”
