The Free Press
This week, journalists Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper released a bombshell book detailing even greater depths of the cover-up of former president Joe Biden’s declining health. Also this week: Biden’s spokesperson decided to announce that the former president has stage 4 prostate cancer.
Coincidence? I think not.
Numerous doctors have pointed out how unlikely it is that Biden was just diagnosed with this cancer. Biden himself even slipped up and said he had cancer in 2022. Common sense tells us that the most powerful man in the world, with access to the best healthcare in the world, would have surely known.
As the father of a cancer survivor, I know firsthand how painful these diagnoses are for patients and their families. But as a former Democratic congressman from Minnesota who, for years, has demanded greater transparency and accountability from my party, I am outraged to see that the important lessons from the top scandal of the 2024 election have still not been learned.
Constant lying and gaslighting the public about Biden’s health has cost the Democratic Party the public’s trust. Rebuilding it first requires the courage and honesty to admit to what happened.
In 2021, I had a front-row seat on two occasions when he addressed the House Democratic Caucus. I also spent time in close proximity to the president during two flights on Air Force One, in 2021 and 2022, where I was alarmed to see the president’s obvious decline in communication skills, gait, and leadership capacity. After the White House holiday party in December 2022, at which the president’s decline was too graphic to ignore, I was left with no doubt in my mind—Biden was unfit to serve a second term.
My opinion wasn’t an outlier. My congressional colleagues, like me, had eyes; behind closed doors we acknowledged the reality, lamented our party leadership’s inaction, and recognized the impending disaster awaiting us in November 2024.
After many of the same hushed conversations, I tried to impress a sense of urgency. I made calls to potential presidential candidates, like Illinois governor JB Pritzker and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, to urge them to run. But they didn’t even want their names mentioned—let alone return my calls.
Frustrated, I went public, calling for an open primary. I implored prominent Democrats like California governor Gavin Newsom, Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, and Vice President Kamala Harris to throw their hats in the ring. But cometh the moment—cameth nobody.
By the fall of 2023, I realized not only that Biden was in serious decline, but that the polling was clearly showing he couldn’t win. My party was sleepwalking into a second Trump term. So, with no one else willing to step forward—I entered the race.
No one puts themselves forward for president if they don’t believe they’re prepared and would do a good job—and I was no exception. But I knew I had a longer-than-long shot. More realistically, I was trying to spark a competitive primary—and at the very least to force a single, televised debate for Americans to assess the president and other candidates firsthand. I simply wanted Americans to see up close what I had seen and what the White House was trying to hide from them, and before it was too late.
Immediately before entering the race, I made courtesy calls to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and President Biden—but the president’s chief of staff, Jeff Zients, took the call and made it clear I would not be speaking to Biden or anyone else in the White House.
I announced that I was running for president on October 27, 2023. Almost immediately, the party mechanism was activated, and I became persona non grata. The media, in particular MSNBC, where former Biden staffers wielded positions of influence—essentially deplatformed me and those supporting me. Party activists, paid and volunteer, took to social media to attack and discredit me.
The Democratic National Committee announced proactively that there would be no debates. State Democratic parties took steps to keep anyone not named “Biden” from being on the ballot, forcing us to file several lawsuits. In Florida, state Democratic Party chair Nikki Fried moved immediately to prevent my name from appearing on the primary ballot—literally disenfranchising millions of Florida voters by denying them the opportunity to even participate in a primary.
This wasn’t a fight for democracy, rather a coordinated fight against democracy—executed by a private corporation with no accountability to voters.
For a party ostensibly focused on protecting democracy and expanding voter rights and access, denying Democratic primary voters a single alternative to Biden was nothing short of rank hypocrisy.
It was one thing for my fellow Democrats to stay silent, to avoid rocking the boat. But some even subjected me to vicious, underhanded attacks. Representatives Steven Horsford and Jim Clyburn even made veiled insinuations of racism when I focused my early efforts in New Hampshire—suggesting my run was somehow an affront to black Americans.
Ironically, their tactics and those who chose cowardice over courage and self-preservation over principle resulted in an affront to ALL Americans.
It has always been my contention that Biden wasn’t behind any of these decisions. And therein lies the problem; he was surrounded by advisers and a family falsely assuring him he was popular, able, and the best candidate to take on Donald Trump.
And where did it get us? All those months of carefully guarding the president, prewriting his speeches, prerecording his interviews? In the end, the only unscripted, significant event President Biden did during his campaign was the July 2024 debate that was an unmitigated disaster. His entire campaign crumbled in the most humiliating way possible.
It’s astonishing that, for so long, Americans have both enabled and tolerated a virtual monopoly on our democracy by two private corporations: the Democratic and Republican parties. In the United States, we should never tolerate monopolies, or in this case duopolies, in any category, never mind the most important one—our democracy.
In real terms, reform means breaking down barriers to access ballots and the electoral system; fostering and inspiring competent, common sense candidates; and encouraging the rise of at least one compelling third party that offers competitive candidates.
For too many Americans, the Democratic brand is now associated with rising costs, inefficiency, tenure over talent, bureaucratic complexity, poor customer service, and the “canceling” of people and ideas that diverge from the Democratic gospel.
There must be an almost obsessive focus on real-world outcomes: lowering healthcare costs, expanding housing, improving public safety and public education, and managing cities, states, and our country in a fiscally responsible manner.
The Democratic Party can still redeem itself. But the first step is for everyone that was aware of Biden’s condition to come clean. No more evasions. No more insistence that he was sharp when you met him. The whole truth will come out, and they would be wise to get ahead of it. If a relatively little-known congressman like me knew that Biden was incapable of leading the country in a second term, what does that say about the complicity of the real party bosses whose names we all know?
American voters of all political perspectives are tired of being ignored, talked down to, lied to, canceled, and expected to choose between competing versions of increasingly similar political dysfunction. For Democrats, this is an existential moment. It’s time to acknowledge their misdeeds and move on.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.” Indeed, trust begins with telling the truth. Not a modified truth. Not a truth that polls say people want to hear. The full truth, and nothing but the truth.
Protecting a president or institution at the cost of its credibility is a shortsighted and losing proposition. Democratic leaders and messengers must understand that sunlight is not our enemy, but rather the only way to earn the public’s confidence in our party.
For more coverage of the Biden scandal, read Oliver Wiseman:
