Joe Biden Diagnosed With “Aggressive Form” of Cancer

Summary

Bulwark Takes: Joe Biden Diagnosed With “Aggressive Form” of Cancer
Release Date: May 19, 2025

In this emotionally charged episode of Bulwark Takes, hosts Stein, the Managing Editor at The Bulwark, and Andrew Egger, author of Morning Shots, delve into the somber news of former President Joe Biden’s diagnosis with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Released on May 19, 2025, this episode navigates the multifaceted implications of Biden’s health revelation, intertwining personal empathy with acute political analysis.

1. Breaking the News: Biden’s Diagnosis

The episode opens with Stein addressing the recent announcement regarding Joe Biden’s health:

“Last week President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday he was diagnosed with prostate cancer characterized by a Gleason score of 9, grade group 5 with metastasis to the bone. While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone sensitive, which allows for effective management. The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”
[01:11]

Stein emphasizes the gravity of the situation, noting the personal and political challenges it presents:

“This was pretty sad news for the ex-president and the people who love him. It's unavoidably coming amid a very difficult stretch for him about his presidency and whether he was fit for service during it.”
[01:30]

2. Humanizing the President

Both hosts express empathy for Biden’s situation, separating personal hardships from political discourse:

“You feel for the guy on a human level, put aside the politics and, and obviously that's totally separate and, and I think ripe for criticism, of course, but it's a tragic thing to happen...”
[02:10]

Andrew Egger adds a layer of compassion, acknowledging the difficulty of addressing such personal matters publicly:

“It's difficult to do a counterfactual, but I think you might have seen a different story. I mean, like, if the president had publicly been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, that's the kind of thing people kind of wrap their heads around.”
[09:06]

3. The Intersection of Health and Politics

The conversation shifts to the broader implications of Biden’s health on his presidency and political legacy:

“We’re not at a place where we’re totally comfortable reporting on or talking about age and how it impacts politics... it's something that we need to get over and talk more frankly about.”
[02:45]

Stein critiques Biden’s decision to seek a second term, linking it to his health challenges:

“He should have never announced he was running for a second term... you're at a heightened risk for things like this to happen. You're rolling the dice.”
[05:27]

Andrew reflects on the complexities faced by aging leaders:

“I can still do it. I’m still there.”
[07:41]

4. Consequences for Political Figures

The discussion explores the ripple effects of Biden’s diagnosis on his administration and Vice President Kamala Harris:

“It just underscores again the difficulty that Kamala Harris has now, like in terms of her political future. Just because she more than anybody else was in the room working with him...”
[12:15]

Both hosts contemplate the precarious position Harris finds herself in, balancing loyalty and the need to address public concerns about leadership continuity.

5. Reflections on Legacy and Historical Impact

As the episode nears its conclusion, Stein and Andrew ponder the long-term ramifications of Biden’s health on his legacy:

“He is likely not going to live to know what his legacy is... it is a tragedy that... we don't know whether he'll be around to ultimately see how history judges him.”
[14:05]

Andrew underscores the unpredictability of Biden’s legacy in light of recent events:

“If Donald Trump totally crashes the United States... then Joe Biden's legacy is enabling that to happen... If we get back on the rails, maybe Biden’s ultimate legacy is a lot of the good work that he got done while he was president.”
[14:05]

6. Concluding Thoughts

Stein wraps up the discussion by highlighting the delicate nature of the topic and thanking Andrew:

“Andre, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it. To the viewers, I appreciate your understanding of this very delicate conversation.”
[15:32]

Key Takeaways

• Personal vs. Political: The episode skillfully balances empathy for Biden’s personal health battle with a critical analysis of its political implications.

• Age and Leadership: A significant portion of the conversation centers on the challenges and taboos associated with aging leaders in high office.

• Legacy Uncertain: Biden’s diagnosis casts uncertainty on his political legacy, leaving observers to ponder how history will ultimately judge his presidency.

• Impact on Vice Presidency: Kamala Harris faces renewed scrutiny and pressure as Biden’s health issues come to light, complicating her political trajectory.

This episode of Bulwark Takes provides a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of a pivotal moment in American political discourse, offering listeners profound insights into the intersection of personal health and national leadership.

Transcript

[Sam]

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[Stein]

Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark and I am joined by Andrew Egger, who is the author of Morning Shots. We're coming to you on Sunday afternoon. Andrew for some reason's in the office, but that's just because he's diligent. We're gonna be talking about pretty somber news that pass the trans today ex President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with cancer. This was the statement from his press person quote. Last week President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms. On Friday he was diagnosed with prostate cancer characterized by a gleason score of 9 grade group 5 with metastasis to the bone. While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone sensitive which allows for effective management. The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians. So I mean, obviously this is fairly saddening news for the ex president and the people who love him. It's unavoidably coming amid a very difficult stretch for him about his presidency and whether he was fit for service during it. And I'm not totally sure honestly how this or if this should affect that conversation, but I have a couple thoughts. The first, and Andrew, you can jump in whenever you want is that, you know, you feel for the guy on a human level, put aside the politics and, and obviously that's totally separate and, and I think ripe for criticism, of course, but it's a tragic thing to happen, especially for Someone whose family has been snake bitten by cancer the way his has two is. And I think this does relate to the conversation we were having prior to this announcement about his frailty, his ability to serve, is that we're not at a place, I think, where we're totally comfortable reporting on or talking about age and how it impacts politics. And I know it feels like we are because we've been talking about it for like months now. But I think if anything, the publication of this book, original Sin, this diagnosis and you know, a whole host of other things shows that we're just a little bit, we still treat a little bit taboo, I think, and it's uncomfortable for us to outwardly address it and I understand why, but it's something that I think we need to get over and talk more frankly about. Anyways, those are my two initial thoughts. I know this is a tricky subject and so I appreciate people understanding that, you know, maybe I haven't. Maybe it's not totally fleshed out and maybe you're going to be upset with something we say, but we're just trying to handle it in real time. Andrew, what did you, what do you make of just the succession of news here for Joe Biden? Obviously? Tragic.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah, just so, I guess just a few things. I mean, one, I mean it's a little hard for us to talk about because we are obviously political reporters. You know, we know as much about kind of the ins and outs of the health diagnosis as anybody does as, as any other layman, like relative bozo on the subject does. I think that, I mean, obviously it's difficult news. I guess the small mercy here is that he is getting this news and we're getting this news in his post presidency. I mean, it would be a much more fraught thing if this had happened a year ago. If this, you know, I mean, imagine just in addition to all of the, all of the kind of like personal difficulty here and all the sort of familial pain and all those sorts of things, having to juggle all of this in addition to the just the burden of having to run the country, which I mean it's just kind of like a common place to talk about how, how much that burden puts pressure on a person, how much it ages a person throughout, throughout their term. And so that's one, you know, just.

[Stein]

To pick on that. Like we've had presidents who have served in incredible distress before, like Woodrow Wilson, Kennedy was serving with incredible distress. Nixon was beset by demons and potentially alcoholism. Right. Like, so it's not that this is totally abnormal. But there's something that feels oddly different in a way. Now. He, I agree with you. He, you know, thank God he wasn't in office when this happened.

[Andrew Egger]

But, but this is, I mean, this is the whole, this is the whole thing about being the oldest president ever in a long time. The baseline of vigor and even all things going quite well. It was kind of a roll of the dice on any given day, like how up to it he was going to be. And obviously this just dramatically complicates that in a way that would not have necessarily afflicted those other presidents.

[Stein]

Well, I mean, this clearly makes, obviously brings home the point that he should never have announced he was running for a second term. I mean, that's, I mean, I'm not trying to be crude about it, but you know, everything that's been reported this past couple weeks, the release of the Robert her audio, even the testimonials of Democrats who now are sort of open to the reckoning that they got it completely wrong. You know, it all points in the same direction, which is he should have taken a one term pledge, should have never had said I was going to run again and should have recognized that at 80 years old, you're at a heightened risk for things like this to happen. You're rolling the dice.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah, yeah, well. And hopefully at the very least, you know, we can finally put to bed the sort of ridiculous exercise of any time the president or the former president is in an interview or whatever, kind of having him go through that, that gauntlet of like, well, should you have dropped out? Should you have run again, making him trot out that answer, oh, I think I could have won if I'd run again. I mean, just that whole horrible, like, at no point was that a useful exercise for anything because what's the guy supposed to say?

[Stein]

But he was never going to say, yeah, I shouldn't have run. Like, no, I mean, he's, he played the game and frankly, you know, that was deceitful. Right. Like, I think he should have been more honest about his frailties and certainly the people around him should have been. I do, I do agree with that.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah. I just go around and around on that because on the one hand, yes, obviously, I mean, like, like, obviously it is the case that he hung on way too long and that especially the people around him were like actively covering for him in various ways. And yet it's very difficult, I mean, to put yourself in his shoes and to say, like any aging professional who's losing their fastball where they, where they're just like, no, I still got it in me. I can still do it. I'm still there.

[Stein]

So that's where. Yes, and, but that's where I get back to this whole thing of, like, it's taboo. Right. Like, Steve Scale, longtime Biden advisor, ran super PAC for him, never worked in the White House, but was one of the bigger online fans and fans, period. He wrote a piece for us where he's like, you know, I think the, the crux of one of the parts is, like, they failed to recognize that they would have been rewarded had they just acknowledged the frailty. I mean, they were very afraid of being like, no, he can't. He's not going to serve a second term. This is just a transition presidency for real. And Steve writes that, like, in fact, had he done that, had he been open about, like, look, I, I, I probably could give it a go, but I'm going to be, like, responsible and, you know, I'm old and, and you, you deserve someone younger. Steve's point is that had he done lines like that, had he, had he made that his posture, that he would have been rewarded for the public, for his honesty, and they would have been, they would have rallied to his side. And I mean, you talk about a sports analogy, but I do think there's something to it. It's like, you know, it's when it seems like it's like the aging at season and they've announced that they're going to retire. Like there is some sort of camaraderie that is felt. There is, there is a nostalgia that almost kicks in. So I don't know, who knows if it translates in politics, but you don't, you don't really have that much politics because people just feel like they are important, too important to retire.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah. And it was just difficult as well, because, I mean, imagine if it had been the other way around. Imagine if, like, if the cancer diagnosis that we got the news of today, if that had come a year and a half ago or two years ago, and it was only just now that, like, the, the obvious kind of, like, aging was catching up to him mentally and in terms of his stamina and all, I mean, I think it's hard to do a counterfactual, but I think you might have seen a different story. I mean, like, if the president had publicly been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, that's the kind of thing people kind of wrap their heads around. Whereas, you know, one of the problems with the kind of aging and the Gradual slipping and all of that that we kind of all saw over the last year is that's the kind of thing that it's so easy for everyone to kind of live in denial about. Right. I mean, and especially the person. The person who's involved.

[Stein]

The other thing about that, though, which kind of has tripped me up a little bit, is like, in a way, you can say, okay, maybe he is physically not where he ever was and is slipping badly, but so long as he's mentally there. Right. Like, that's what counts. Right. Like. And so for a little while, and, you know, I'm just dipping back into my time editing the White House, beat around this for a little while. Like, the stories were around sort of the physical stuff. Right. It was like, oh, he needs the shorter staircase. He's wearing these different sneakers. He's, you know, not really, you know, doing three or four nights in a row overseas. He's ducking out on the last night. Like, he's tired, more like. And that's bad. Obviously, it's not great, but you can sort of put that into a different bucket than the mental stuff. The mental stuff was always harder for us to kind of COVID because, you know, you'd have slippages in interviews and you'd have gas. And of course, that was, like, you write about it, but there was. It didn't. Never felt like we could. I don't know. I didn't. I don't want to say never felt, but it was hard to come to some sort of consensus opinion about where he was on a mental scale up until the debate.

[Andrew Egger]

Debate, yeah.

[Stein]

And then it became very obvious. I mean, there were certainly signs, and we wrote about them, but it just. Those two buckets were always hard to kind of make put together. Does that. I don't know if that makes sense.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah, no, absolutely. And the other. The other element of it is just, you know, seeing the whole kind of, like, political apparatus around him, kind of like helping him message himself and kind of like.

[Stein]

Yeah. And that certainly felt. That certainly felt mental. But there's also like, well, maybe he's just tired. I don't know.

[Andrew Egger]

Right. And just the fact that that's always happening for the President of the United States. Right. I mean, there's. There's always Donald Trump. Well, I mean, totally with Donald Trump, he'll say something insane, and the. And the people will come around and kind of like, massage it back in the direction of policy or whatever. And that's the kind of stuff we don't need to endlessly relitigate. The move of last year. I guess the one thing, and I hate even talking this much about politics for the whole thing because really it's a personal story about him. But I guess the one other political thing that we need to say in the context of all of this is going forward. Well, I guess two things I would say one thing about the kind of horrible nitty gritty politics stuff that we have to talk about, which is that it's just kind of underscores again the difficulty that Kamala Harris has now, like in terms of her political future. Just because she more than anybody else was like in the room working with him, like in a, in a personal position to kind of stick up for him and his, his acuity and his, his readiness and all these sorts of things. And the one, on the one hand it's like what's she supposed to say? She's not going to go out and sandbag her boss in real time. On the other hand, it's hard for her to come out and, and, and explain why all through that period she along with the rest of the apparatus was saying no, he's, he's there, he's got it all going. And I mean like, you know, if it hadn't been for that debate in the world that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and I guess all of us would have rather had than the world that we'd be in. Right. Than the world that we're in right now in our ideal world, you know, going back a year ago, this would be nation shaking news. Right. Because Joe Biden would be the president again and we'd be dealing with all this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I say, in our, in our ideal world.

[Stein]

Well, look. Yeah, no, I hear you. It's it again. I go back to what you just said, which is like it's, is, was her supposed to just sandbag her boss.

[Andrew Egger]

It's, it's a no situation.

[Stein]

It's, it's hard. It's hard.

[Andrew Egger]

But, but that means it's, it's a no win situation. But like that doesn't mean it's not going to like stick around.

[Stein]

No, it should. Yeah, of course. And that's the, that's the price you pay is that you took that path and now you have to answer questions for it.

[Andrew Egger]

Can I, can I just say one other thing on the politics of this, which is just like the thing that keep coming back to when I think about this and we don't, we again, we don't really know fully like what the deal is. With this cancer, we know it's quite bad. It's, you know, prostate cancer kills a lot of.

[Stein]

He's 82 years old, he's got prostate cancer. They said, they didn't say treatment, they said management. You know, people live with prostate cancer, they can live for years managing prostate cancer. But at his age, you know, it's, it's not a great diagnosis.

[Andrew Egger]

Like, without, without getting into, like prognosticating about all of that. Like, the thing that I keep coming back to is just the, the tragic fact that, that Biden is, is likely not going to live to kind of know what, what his legacy is. Right? I mean, like, right now you can tell that it's just eating like the, the fact that is eating him is the end of his presidency. It's the fact that he kind of crash landed out and Donald Trump went back in and the endless relitigation in the press and all these books coming out. I mean, like, that, that is the only fact of his presidency as far as like the current political moment is concerned. And he might not get to see what comes after that and what comes after that. We don't know what his ultimate legacy will be because we don't know how this story ends in the short term. Obviously, if Donald Trump totally crashes the United States basically out of circulation as the power it's been, then Joe Biden's legacy is enabling that to happen. If we kind of get back on the rails and there's life after all of this in a way that we all like and appreciate, then maybe Biden's ultimate legacy is a lot of the good work that he got done while he was president. And nobody gets to know what that is now. And, and it's, it is a tragedy that, that, you know, this is the moment that that Biden is, is enduring as he's enduring all these other things. And, and we don't know, you know, whether he'll be around to, to ultimately see how history judges him. I mean, nobody gets to ultimately see how history judges them, I guess, but that's just kind of the, the, the tragedy of it all that, that's kind of going around my head right now.

[Stein]

You know what, that's a good place to end it on. Not much tied to that. Andre, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it. To the viewers, I appreciate your understanding of this very delicate conversation. We thought it was important enough that we should hop on and quickly discuss it with you all.

[Sam]

When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof, allbirds or skims, sure you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the businesses behind the business making selling and for the shoppers buying. Simple for millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. And the not so secret secret with Shop pay that boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning way less carts going abandoned and way more sales going. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout skims uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com audioboom all lowercase go to shopify.com audioboom to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com audioboom.